Marketing is the art of spreading information to attract new customers.
War is ninety percent information.
Napoleon Bonaparte, French Military and Political Leader
Measuring information is impacting sales is where marketing reporting comes into play. In this article, we’re going through the past, the present and the future of marketing reporting. We’re also going to share templates, tools (updated as of 2020) and dashboards. But first let’s look at the definition of marketing reporting
What is marketing reporting?
Marketing reporting is defined as the process of measuring the progress towards meeting goals. It helps you to understand what actions to take and how your marketing effort is creating value.
We all know about the power of information and we all know that more and more money is going into marketing. Most buying decisions are now based (or if not, heavily influenced) on information which is found through a search. Gone are the days where a sales person is the first touchpoint with a brand. The result: Increasing marketing budgets. As a result senior management, more than ever, want to understand the impact of spend to revenue.
Why do we need marketing reporting?
Increasing budgets
In the past, most marketing efforts were offline based (Check out Mad Men if you are too young to remember). Their way of measuring outcomes was using panels (as described here). We now live in a new era where the opposite is true: There are too many metrics we are able to track. Marketing reporting helps us to understand what metrics to watch and how to action on them to achieve our goals.
Increased complexity of marketing landscape
I’m not going to dive too much into the metrics (if you are interested have a look at this article here). Instead, let’s have a look at it from a maturity perspective. In the chart below you can find 5 categories:
Types of marketing reports (by maturity)
I’m not going to dive too much into the metrics (if you are interested you can have a look at this article here
25 Essential PPC Marketing Performance Metrics you should analyze and measure, instead let’s have a look at it from a maturity perspective. In the chart below you can find 5 categories:
Marketing Reporting Maturity
Now let’s dive into them one by one, going from beginner to expert.
Traffic
Certain marketers optimize outcomes based on traffic to the website, their outcome is what the title suggests: Traffic. To get a marketing report based on traffic from your various sources do the following:
Open your Analytics platform and go to the acquisition section as in the screenshot below.
For a more elegant looking report with the same data set you can use Google Data Studio. This make it easy for you to present data to your clients or your manager. Here is a template:
Traffic report data studio
Make your own copy here.
Summary
Traffic reports will give you an understanding on how you get potential buyers to your website. Important: It does not look into any other metrics. While it can be helpful you should not only look at traffic. Especially if you have a media buy it’s important to look at these metrics combined with costs. Let’s have a look on how we can do this in the next marketing report.
CPC/CTR
CPC stands for cost per click, CTR stand for click-through-rate. Marketing reporting on CPC/CTR connect:
This report, same as a traffic report, focuses on clicks but has the advantage of adding on the costs per click.
The click through rate is a good way to check if your content wins over the customer to click on your link.
In SEO this is a good way of measuring how your SERP (search engine results page) content appeals to the searcher.
In paid advertising CTR’s are also important bu there is a lack of direct correlation between clicks and business actions.
As with the traffic dashboards you can find all Google related data in Google Analytics. The report below contains conversions and CPA’s which we’ll get to later.
CPC and CTR report Google Analytics
As with traffic reports, Data Studio offers templates for all Google related costs.
CPC report Data Studio
There are also tools to automate the connection of the data, more about this here. This should help you to get all marketing data into one place.
Let’s move on to metrics which will impress your client or management more than reporting on clicks and CTR’s.
Analytics conversions
Here is where it starts to get interesting. The reports we looked at so far were based on outcomes (clicks or sessions) which do not correlate with business impact. The quote
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein, Physicist
Fits this perfectly.
As you have noted by now on all the reports there are a lot of different metrics and dimensions to choose from. It’s important to measure what matters. Thats what’s next: Conversion based marketing reporting means that your goal are leads or sales. There are two possible conversion types here:
Conversion based marketing reporting means that your goal are leads or sales. There are two possible conversion types here
- Ecommerce transactions: You sell something online and you have a direct conversion value. In this case it makes sense to skip this section and move to the ROI section.
- Lead capturing: Your goal is to get as many leads, form fills, event subscriptions, etc. as possible. The final outcome is a persons email address and/or details.
The measurement to look at in conversions based marketing is CPA. CPA stands for cost per acquisition. Sometimes you might hear the term CPL, which stands for cost per lead. The formula for CPA or CPL is
Cost/Conversions
As with the CPC/CTR dashboard Google Analytics provides you simple overview for anything Google related.
In case you only advertise on Google channels, please refer to the dashboards I linked in CPC/CTR. Chances are that if you are reading this you will have extra media channels you want to report on. Here is a Data Studio multichannel CPA Dashboard Template. You might need to change the channel mix according to your setup.
Multi channel marketing report
Now let’s see how we can connect business outcomes from your CRM in your marketing reporting.
CRM Conversions
Let’s take a step back. If you are in ecommerce, when working on your reporting, did you ask yourself the question
How many confirmed transactions (not cancelled) did each marketing channel or campaign generate?
For those working with lead forms did you ask yourself
How many qualified leads, opportunities and deals did my marketing channels and campaigns generate?
The best way to go and answer these questions is by connecting your analytics data with your CRM or e-commerce data. You should understand which channel, campaign, ad or keyword brings you valuable conversions. Having insights on what brings you leads vs. qualified leads are different worlds. The ability to present data on qualified leads in marketing report brings credibility. It is evidence that your advertising efforts connect to real-world business outcomes. This Data Studio CRM attribution dashboard template connects your CRM and analytics data. You can also find instructions on how to connect your analytics and CRM on the dashboard itself.
Multi channel CRM marketing report
The insights will also tell you which channel bring you junk leads.
For ecommerce, connecting store data to analytics data helps you with net revenue attribution. In hospitality: Connecting your booking engine data to your analytics data uncovers insights. You can understand channels and campaigns with higher return and cancellation rates.
In a next step, let’s look into connecting the revenue which comes with these conversions.
ROI
This is the by far the best way to present numbers in any marketing report. In ROI based marketing reports, the conversion value is added to the conversion.
This allows us to connect revenue contribution to the marketing expenditures. If it’s done in an automated way this goes down to a channel, campaign, keyword or even ad level.
In the case of ecommerce this is straightforward as you have the conversion value available in Google Analytics.
You might have a situation where you are in an industry or region where you have to deal with a lot of cancellations or returns.
In the case of form fills, which only convert into opportunities and deals in the CRM system, the data needs matching. More about this in the section CRM conversions.
Here is an example of an ROI dashboard
ROI marketing reporting dashboard
Attribution
Now that you made it this far you are starting to become an expert in marketing reporting. Independent of technology now you have an understanding of the importance of marketing reporting.
By the way, the most famous tools for data visualisation at the moment (May 2020) are:
One important topic when it comes to marketing reporting is attribution.
By default Google Analytics and most CRMs provide you information about what touchpoint made the deal. Touchpoints before that will get no credit.
Let me illustrate
Last Click Journey
In reality the customer more likely looks like this
CRM Revenue Attribution 2
Assigning the correct conversion credit to each touchpoint is multi-touch attribution.
If you want to understand the true ROI of each channel you will need to give credit to each touchpoint. I’m not going too much in detail in this article as we cover this topic in other articles on our blog. Model Attribution For Dummies
and understanding marketing attribution: models, strategy and benefits cover everything about attribution.
Conclusion
Marketing reporting is about measuring and reporting what matters. It shouldn’t take you too long to create a good report as there are many templates available on the web. Depending on your stake-holders level of knowledge you might need to drill deep or you need to keep it at a top level. Being efficient in presenting and preparing the data is key.
An important consideration if you don’t have a template yet is: Do I work with a manual or an automated report? I recommend the latter as it will save you lots of work and removes the chance of human error.
