Sharing Insights with C-level Executives in an Efficient Way

A management dashboard is a tool used to present all important management KPIs in a single place, share insights with c-level executives in an efficient way, and empower the management to make fast and data-driven decisions based on the latest information. Reporting helps you show exactly how your social media campaigns, search engine marketing tactics, and other digital strategies drive business outcomes. If you can objectively prove—using data—that you helped grow sales X amount by doing Y during a certain period, you will have a much easier time with getting your budget requests approved, securing a promotion, and more. Such communication between yourself and upper management is also necessary for ensuring that the business is working towards the right goals and that those goals are being met.

You can’t optimize what you can’t measure, and you can’t measure without a proper data tracking mechanism in place.  And that’s why marketing reports are so important: on the one hand, they’re your way of proving that the strategies you’re putting in place are having a positive impact on the bottom line, and on the other hand, they’re also your way of constantly improving those strategies.

What is a marketing report?

A marketing report is a document that combines data from across multiple platforms to show the overall performance results of your global marketing strategy. While the scope of a marketing report can be varied depending on the number of platforms you’re gathering data from and the subject matter (analytics, social media, SEO, etc.), the purpose is to understand whether your current marketing strategies are going in the right direction, as well as how to optimize them.

When do you need to make one?

You’re in marketing; you’re going to want to look at your performance data constantly, probably on a daily basis.  However, although daily or weekly perusal is useful, the general rule of thumb for regular marketing reports is to create them on a monthly basis. In data-speak, a month is a long enough time to gather enough relevant data, but it’s not too long that you miss opportunities or let lower-performing strategies to stick around for too long.  This is why it’s important that you have access to an up-to-date marketing report whenever you need it, but you share and discuss those reports with your boss and clients on a monthly basis.

Why are marketing report templates so important?

Choosing the right KPIs that you want to follow in each type of marketing report can be a bit overwhelming, which is why a selection of marketing report templates are a great place to start.  The following templates will provide you with a solid frame on which to build. As you get to know what KPIs you’re using more, which ones you find are missing, or which ones you tend to analyse together, you’ll be able to customize the reports over time according to exactly what makes the most sense to you and your clients.

1. General marketing report template 

Regardless of the particular goals you might have for your channel-specific marketing strategies, ideally, all your efforts are ultimately geared towards reaching your wider business goals, right?  That’s why you want to start with a general marketing report template; this will serve as an overview of all your strategies together.  The big picture basically.  This template is going to include bits and pieces of data from across your web analytics, SEO, social media, PPC, email, and anything else you find crucial to have here.  The point with this type of report isn’t to delve into the details though; it’s important that you keep this as a real overview. When you want to get into the details, that’s when you create one of the following marketing reports!   

2. SEO marketing report template  

Search engine optimization is an integral part of every digital marketer’s long-term strategy; if PPC, web advertising, email, and social media are the numerous branches of your digital marketing, SEO is the trunk.  Google Analytics, SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, WebCEO… the tools you’re using to execute, track, and optimize your SEO strategies can be pretty varied. They each have their own specialities and uses, but since you need to see how they ALL serve to aid your global SEO strategy, your SEO report most likely needs to include data from across them all.  So what should be included in your SEO marketing report template? Well, you’re probably going to need 4 main types of KPIs here:  organic sessions, organic conversions, organic landing pages, and organic keywords.  

Across these types, you’ll want to include important KPIs such as overall visits from organic, organic conversion rate, top organic keyword by clicks, and more. Basically, the point is to show the amount of traffic your organic efforts brings in, the type of traffic, and what this traffic means for your general bottom line. If you’d like to include a comparative to non-organic traffic, that can be a nice addition – although, those types of comparisons could also be on your general marketing report mentioned above.   

3. PPC marketing report template  

SEO and PPC go together like peanut-butter and jelly. And contrary to SEO, the advantage of PPC is that the return on investment is far easier to track and understand in the short-term; it’s really the simple calculation of “dollar-out, dollar-in.”  Again, there’s a wide range of marketing tools at your disposal for your PPC campaigns, the most common of which are Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, SEMrush, and DoubleClick Campaign Manager.  The perfect PPC marketing report template is all about those clicks and dollars. Again, you’re going to have 4 overarching themes in this report:  clicks & cost, conversions, revenues, and ad performance.  To organize these KPIs, it’s often easier to divide your report by channel (AdWords vs. Bing Ads, for example), to make it easier to understand your budget allocation, since you’ll want to know which channels are bringing you the most bang for your buck.   

4. Social media marketing report template  

Ah, social media; one of the “newer” digital marketing realms, and yet, also one of the most important. The number of social media users worldwide is over 3 billion, so it’s a safe assumption to say that there are a myriad audiences to reach here.  When we talk about social media marketing, we can either mean through organic means (community engagement and content sharing, for example), or through paid channels on those same networks. And although there are quite a few social networks around, the most common ones you’re most likely going to be using and want to include in your social media marketing report will be Facebook Insights and Ads, Instagram, LinkedIn Pages and Ads, Twitter, and YouTube.  There are again 4 main types of KPIs in this template:  likes & followers, impression & reach, engagement, and top performing posts.  In order to understand what kind of ROI you’re getting from each of your networks, the ideal social media marketing report template has your data organized accordingly. With sections for each of the social media platforms that you use – one for Facebook, one for Twitter, one for LinkedIn, and so on – you can better determine where you need to be allocating more time and energy… and where it might not be worth it.   

5. Display advertising campaign marketing report template  

Display advertising is the internet’s version of the billboard. And it’s often as effective in attracting the eye as its live-version predecessor.  Bring all the data from across Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, Brightcove, and your other display advertising tools together into one report so that you can optimize your strategy as a whole, instead of only seeing on one platform at a time.  The advertising campaign marketing report template is another one that is best organized by platform, so that you can compare performance and pinpoint where your highest ROI is, and where might need some improvement.  The KPIs that are included in this template touch on the necessities like:  cost, clicks, conversions, click through rate (CTR), and impressions.  Everything you need to make the most of your display ads!   

6. Ecommerce marketing report template  

Your ecommerce strategy is constantly evolving as you come out with new products and services, and as the market itself changes. This ecommerce marketing report template ensures that you have all your KPIs at your fingertips so that you can take advantage of your opportunities as they crop up!  Since ecommerce really touches on several aspects of your web presence, the tools you use are going to range from Google Analytics and AdWords, to quite possibly your social media networks and display advertising platforms as well.  Your ecommerce report might resemble the general marketing report that we mentioned above, with a few more details particular to ecommerce businesses. As such, the report should start with an overview of your performance, with KPIs such as sessions, transactions, revenue, and conversion rate.  Since the performance of your website has a direct effect on your ecommerce numbers, it’s important to include KPIs such as percentage of new sessions, bounce rate, and pages per session as well. Obviously, you’ll have a report section dedicated to only your ecommerce results: number of transactions, product sales, average order value… this is where you really get into the hard numbers.  The last two sections of your ecommerce report are geared to the two ways in which you drive traffic:  Paid advertising, where KPIs include ROAS, clicks, and cost per transaction. SEO, where KPIs include sessions from organic, revenue from organic, and conversion rate.   

7. Email marketing report template  

Email marketing remains to this day one of the most effective parts of digital marketing; you’re quite literally landing your campaign directly in your audiences’ hands, and in front of their eyes. It’s hard to beat that type of targeting.  That’s why an email marketing report template is so important. With such potential at your fingertips, the slightest optimizations in open rate or click through rate can make a world of difference to your bottom line.  Whether you’re using MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, or your own internal system that you track with Google Analytics, there are a few KPIs that are non negotiable:  number of emails sent, unique open rate, click rate, and overall campaign performance.  Basically, you want to know how much of your audience you reached, whether they were interested enough to open your message, and, ultimately, whether they converted thanks to your campaign.   

Marketing report templates give you what you need, quickly!