In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, staying on top of campaign performance and strategy effectiveness is crucial for success. This is where digital marketing reports can play a pivotal role so your company can achieve the highest possible return on investment (ROI) for your company. 

A digital marketing report serves as a vital tool in this endeavour, providing a comprehensive overview of various marketing efforts. But what exactly is a digital marketing report, and why is it so important?

Let’s dig deeper!

What Is A Digital Marketing Report?

A digital marketing report is a document that compiles and analyzes data from various online marketing activities. Its primary purpose is to measure the performance of marketing campaigns, assess their effectiveness, and inform future strategies. These reports can cover a wide range of digital marketing channels, including social media, email marketing, SEO, PPC, content marketing, and more.

These reports can be in several formats which we will discuss below. But, who are the main users of these marketing reports? Let's find out!

Who Needs A Digital Marketing Report?

In short, every marketing team needs to create and use a digital marketing report. These reports are how a marketing team can determine the effectiveness of the recently completed campaign that the team carried out. 

Top executives and clients also typically will want to see these marketing reports to know how the marketing investments have performed and areas where they can improve. Without these reports, your marketing efforts are basically a shot in the dark. 

Things To Include In A Digital Marketing Report

Every digital marketing report should include a few things such as: 

• Executive summary: This section provides a high-level overview of the report, summarizing key findings, trends, and actionable insights.

• List of goals and objectives: Here, the report outlines the objectives of the marketing campaigns and the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure success.

• List of completed actions: Include the list of things that you have done as part of the marketing team's efforts in the campaign to show how you are adding value to the team.

• Comparison tables for metrics: We compare metrics from different time periods to spot trends and areas of improvement by channels and traffic medium. 

• Marketing and campaign analysis: This is the core of the report, where data from various marketing channels is presented and analyzed. Visual aids like charts, graphs, and tables are often used to make the data more comprehensible. Analysis includes examining trends, comparing performance across different periods, and identifying areas for improvement.

• Recommendations and next steps moving forward: Highlighting your next steps and recommendations are a great way to end the report as it provides direction moving forward for the client and top execs.

Types Of Digital Marketing Report Formats

These reports for the marketing team can be created in several formats as per the structure and kind of requirement from the client. However, as a standard rule of thumb, we recommend these following formats for best results.

Dashboards

Creating digital marketing reports in a dashboard format is a good idea only if we have a clean source of data which can be automated with ease. This allows us to just share a dashboard with the client from where they can easily collect the performance data of the running marketing efforts. We can use dashboarding tools such as Power BI or Looker Studio for such purposes. 

To know more about dashboarding using Power BI, keep your eyes on the Case When Blog site to stay updated with the tool!

However, dashboards can often be too simplistic and generic, in which case we can use some of the other formats mentioned below. 

Google Sheet/Excel

Google sheets or Excel are a great way to create digital marketing reports too. These enable you to go deeper into the data and are simple to use. You can also share these reports online with any number of people who can work in it simultaneously as well. 

PDF Report

PDF reports are a great way to create and share digital marketing reports to your clients. It allows your report to be more in depth spanning multiple pages and including historical data for comparison. 

You can share these reports by downloading the PDFs and sharing it via email or other communication method.

Essential Digital Marketing Reports

SEO Reports

Search engine optimization is an important part of most digital marketing plans. SEO allows us to improve and increase traffic quality to our sites and this means we must upgrade our reporting skills with all-in SEO marketing dashboards that includes SEO performance overview, site traffic metrics and other status reports

When creating an SEO marketing report, you should include

• Organic sessions

• Organic conversions

• Organic landing pages

• Keyword rankings

Social Media Marketing Reports

Social media reports are mainly split into Paid and Organic traffic analysis. These reports give us a clear idea on the performance of our Facebook and Google ads versus the performance of organic traffic through different sources. 

These social media reports include performance of different social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn - so these make up a big part of these reports. 

The most important KPIs in this type of report include:

• Likes and follows

• Demographics

• Impressions

• Reach

• Engagement

• Top performing posts

There are many such reports involved in digital marketing which play a pivotal role in decision making and strategic roadmap which decodes the marketing strategy in the long run. 

Closing Remarks

Digital marketing has boomed in the last decade or so and hence it is vital we know the different reporting angles involved with this branch of marketing. It not only helps understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, but also ensures that money is being spent wisely and customers are not bombarded with meaningless ads and campaign notifications. 

These are things which a digital marketing report can help fix! 

There are many tools out there which can help create a marketing report template for you. If not, you can create your own templates as per the needs of your marketing efforts. I hope this blog can serve as a stepping stone into the world of digital marketing reporting and you will keep learning to unlock the full potential of digital marketing reports!

FAQs

What are the top 5 C's of digital marketing?

The 5 Cs of digital marketing are Content, Context, Connection, Community, and Conversion. This helps create a more effective digital marketing strategy!

Can I create marketing reports using Excel?

Yes, marketing reports have long been created using Excel or Google Sheets and will continue to be done so given the flexibility and features it provides. However, there are many other tools out there now which you can explore too.