How to Build Effective Marketing Reports: Tips and Best Practices

Ultimately, your marketing is a series of decisions based on your best judgments, but you need to know how those decisions play out in the real world—and that’s what a marketing report can do. Marketing reports make sense of your efforts and let you know what you are doing right and where you might need to change your strategy. They can also substantiate your budget and help gain buy-in from financial decision-makers.  

Today, we’ll explore marketing reports, their definitions, why you need them, how they are structured, and provide examples to help you visualize the concept.  

What is a Marketing Report? 

Marketing reports are documents that detail vital marketing data and information in a way that can be shared with company stakeholders.  

You need a marketing report to analyze and quantify campaign performance, compare results to expectations, and gain actionable insights on how to improve based on your goals.  

While your report may contain many items, the overarching purpose is to highlight performance, show you where you’re winning, and provide a data-driven basis for future marketing spend.  

Why Do You Need a Marketing Report? 

Companies today cannot afford to operate in the dark. Competition is fierce, and running campaigns on instinct or without hard data to back up your decisions is like leaving money on the table.  

Marketing reports help you: 

• Inform decision-making. Verifiable data from marketing reports helps you make better decisions and achieve more predictable results.  

• Understand campaign performance. Marketing reports give you a real-life assessment of your campaigns, strategies, and channel performance. 

• Optimize marketing budgets. Knowing where your strengths and weaknesses are allows you to channel resources more efficiently.  

• Understand your customers better. Marketing reports illuminate the customer journey and give you deep insights into their behavior, preferences, and what parts of the journey may require optimization.  

• Visualize marketing data. Marketing reports provide the detailed data you need at your fingertips, organized visually in a way that’s easy to understand, share, and communicate. 

Today’s multi-channel strategies are layered and complex. Without the right marketing reporting software, there is little chance even the most talented marketing professional would be capable of the type of analysis a modern marketing report can do. And why would you want to spend all your time working on a manual report? By the time you crunch all the data, it would be yesterday’s news.  

The alternative—doing nothing and hoping for the best—isn’t viable either. Organizations need real-time insights to succeed, making the case for marketing reports as essential to doing business today.  

What to Include in a Marketing Report 

Choosing the right metrics to track in a marketing report is vital. Ideally, you’ll want to include data that has meaning to you based on your goals. Modern marketing reporting software provides innumerable options, but we recommend narrowing down your choices so you can focus on what’s important—the simpler, the better! 

Be sure to include an overview or summary to clarify what people can expect to learn in the report.  

Here are a few marketing report examples to consider: 

Web analytics metrics 

Google Analytics can tell you a lot about your web traffic. A marketing report takes volumes of website data and breaks it down in various ways. You’ll see where your traffic is coming from, which ads are performing best, and gain specific insights on your audience, their preferences, and how your website supports your campaigns.  

Performance metrics 

One of the most valuable things a marketing report delivers is performance metrics. A high click-through rate (CTR) indicates that your ads are getting noticed, while conversion rates show how many of your clicks become actual customers. Other performance metrics include impressions, ad engagement, cost-per-click, cost per lead, and overall marketing ROI.  

Website traffic metrics 

Web traffic is an excellent gauge of marketing success as it will tell whether your ads hook people. Web traffic can be broken down into sources: referral traffic, bounce rate, average session duration, average time on page, page views, unique visitors, etc. Knowing these metrics helps you visualize the customer journey and better understand your customer’s preferences, enabling you to optimize every stage of the marketing funnel for maximum impact.  

Social media metrics 

Social media provides incredible opportunities to market to a broader audience, but it’s easy for ads to get lost in the noise and cost you more than they’re worth. Social media metrics like number of impressions, reach, engagement rate, interactions, conversions, views, shares, and click-through rate help you understand which channels are performing best so you can allocate your resources more effectively.  

What Makes a Good Marketing Report? 

If you’re new to marketing reports, you may wonder how to make a marketing report or what constitutes a good one. In a word: relevance. As we mentioned in the previous section, if you include a bunch of numbers that don’t reflect what matters to you, you’re just cluttering up the page.  

Though we can’t tell you precisely what to focus on—that’s down to you, your campaign goals, and what your stakeholders care about—we have a few tips to help you focus. 

1. Tailor reports to the audience 

In this context, ‘audience’ refers to the people you’ll present the report to, i.e., colleagues, leaders, executives, etc. Understand what matters most to your stakeholders and choose metrics that best reflect their motivations. Don’t assume they understand everything you’ll show them. Be prepared to substantiate and explain how your report metrics relate to their concerns. 

2. Define clear goals for your report 

Most report presentations have a specific goal. Design your report around well-defined goals to ensure the data tells a clear story to back up that goal. Too much data can be overwhelming. Focus on the most relevant points, prioritize data with impact, and create a marketing report that concisely represents your campaign goals.

3. Identify key metrics and KPIs to report on 

Measure what matters. Choose your reporting metrics and KPIs wisely for maximum impact. Ultimately, marketing reporting is about quantifying ROI, so choose your metrics with that in mind. Measure ad spend, brand lift, and performance/conversions by channel, and compare how different types of ads perform relative to your goals. These are just a few examples. Be sure to consider how your SEO tactics perform, as these factors can make or break your results.  

4. Focus on visual representation 

Design your report using infographics, charts, and graphs to present your data visually. Visual elements are more engaging and make data easier to understand. Assume that the people you’re presenting to don’t have the time or attention span to figure it out for themselves. The simpler you make the report, the more meaningful it will be.  

Marketing Reporting Examples and Templates 

There are various types of marketing reports. Understanding what’s possible will help you choose a report that best suits your needs. Marketing reports can be campaign-specific, channel-specific, or periodic, measuring marketing performance over a set timeframe. 

Here are a few examples of marketing reports you can run. Slingshot is an advanced marketing reporting tool with templates that are easy to customize to highlight the data you want to consider.  

Generic High-Level Report 

High-level reports give you a broad overview of all your relevant data. This report includes all data you choose to track, consolidating data from Google Analytics and all connected sources.  

SEO Report 

SEO reports show how your website performs relative to your organic SEO efforts. These reports tTrack landing page performance, conversions by page, sessions, bounce rate, source, device, user type, etc.  

Paid Search Report 

Choose a paid search report to view your PPC and Google Ad performance and gain a visual on performance over time.  

Paid Social Performance Report 

Connect all social media pages, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, etc. View performance metrics like sessions, bounce rate, and clicks, and gain a better understanding of traffic sources to identify the best channels to focus on.  

Click here to preview a template.  

Email Performance Report 

Email marketing is one of the most impactful marketing tactics, as your audience has already opted in. Understanding email performance enables you to streamline campaigns and drive better results using real-time metrics in a dashboard representing a single source of truth.  

Final Thoughts 

Marketing reports are essential for any company looking to streamline and improve its marketing efforts. Real-time reports, such as those you can run from Slingshot, help you communicate critical details to stakeholders and gain buy-in from decision-makers. This, ensuresing everyone has the information they need to make better decisions, optimize ad spend, and focus attention where needed. 

Slingshot’s simple dashboards allow you to connect data sources and create reports and custom dashboards with just a few clicks. We make light work of creating marketing reports so you can focus on crushing the competition. Sign up and start creating world-class marketing reports today.