HOW TO CREATE THE BEST DIGITAL MARKETING REPORT
Creating a good digital marketing report is as important as the marketing strategy itself. You can come up with the best advertising ideas, choose the most appropriate settings and generate amazing results, but if you won’t be able to convey to your clients what you have achieved, all that hard work will go to waste. In this article, our experts with years of experience while working with clients from different industries share their best tips on how to create a marketing report that people actually read.
1. Create different sections between different data sources in your digital marketing report
Don’t mix up data from different advertising platforms and different analytics tools on one page of the report. Sperate these different sources between different pages. This will create a structure that is way easier to go through and understand. It is also useful to agree with a client what attribution models and sources you will be using for your reporting and what is the difference between them. This is vital since the data between advertising platforms and analytics platforms differ. These differences might cause a great deal of confusion for your clients. That’s why we recommend using the advertising platform’s data to overview advertising results of a certain platform and analytics’ data for a broad overview of your client’s website and its’ efficiency.
2. Agree on specific marketing goals and choose correct metrics to measure them
Discuss with your client what are his marketing goals. This will dictate what metrics you should track. Don’t be immediately alarmed if other metrics that you are not optimizing for will change. Here’s a simple example. If your client says that the main goal is a certain ROAS (this goal is useful if a client has a lot of products with different prices) pay less attention to such metrics as cost per acquisition. While pursuing the bigger ROAS your CPA will most likely grow since the algorithms behind all marketing platforms might sacrifice the bigger number of sales for sales of big-ticket items. You can most definitely include secondary metrics into your reports but while making comments and recommendations to your clients know the difference between what changes require immediate action and what is just part of the process.
3. Provide context in your digital marketing reports
If you only provide bare numbers of the current reporting period to your clients your marketing reports are basically worth nothing. 100 sales might be a very good result for some online stores or it could be a huge drop for others. Without providing a comparison to the previous period or previous year your data is meaningless since the client can’t tell if things changed for the better or the worse. These references to the past periods should be apparent immediately without your client having to dig up old reports.
Furthermore, it is useful to see how certain metrics fluctuate from the perspective of the whole year month by month. This kind of data tracking will allow you to identify periods of high (or low) demand and prepare for them. It will also allow you to identify the impact of your work on a longer period and present it to your clients in an easy-to-understand visual way.
Finally, if you have knowledge about the industry benchmarks and global market changes leave them in the comments next to the data you are providing. Especially if you just started a collaboration with your client they might not know what is the good CTR for their industry in a certain country. Is their result good or are they lightyears below their competition? This also applies if you start advertising in new markets or releasing new product categories. The same goes if there are some market disruptions due to pandemics, supply shortages, and other factors. Research them and provide commentary if your client is the outlier of a market trend or are they on the course with other players.
4. Provide an overview of the client’s competitors activities
The one thing that truly distinguishes an exceptional digital marketing report from just an average one is the research of your competitors. All clients love to see how is their competition doing, what are they offering. It’s a great way to get inspired and simply keep up with the puls of the industry. Every month go through a few of your biggest competitors and provide screenshots of their newest ads. You can easily find their current ads in the Facebook ads library, such tools as SEM Rush and simply googling their product keywords. Trust us, your clients will love this extra step.
5. Don’t forget to track on-site metrics
Although you are probably responsible only for digital advertising it is useful to include on-site metrics in your digital marketing reports. This approach will help you understand if you are providing the right traffic to the site. For example, if you are targeting mostly women but something happened and the number of men purchasing on your site increased this is a sign that you need to investigate and most probably adjust your advertising targeting.
Another reason to include on-site metrics is being able to identify if there is something wrong with the website. If your engagement metrics like CTR are great but CPA keeps growing it means that there is something wrong with the product itself or the purchasing experience. You need to identify these problems as soon as possible and communicate to your client that you are doing your best, users are responding well to the ads but some major changes are needed on the website. Otherwise, no matter how good your ads are, you will not be able to see a positive change in key metrics.
A good report that conveys your hard work is key to a great relationship with your client. It’s natural that in some months you won’t be able to show great growth in the results. Believe us, it won’t really matter if you will be able to explain these fluctuations backed by data that is provided in easy to understand way. That’s why we created Admers with all these tips in mind. Our goal is to help your business grow while improving your relationship with your clients. It might look like that it will take way too much time to implement these steps in every report but with our platform, you will create kick-ass reports within minutes.