Modern marketers can become overwhelmed by the countless data points they operate with. Website analytics, social media metrics, paid ads performance, email marketing indicators, and many more provide a lot of raw data.
However, marketing reporting takes this raw data and turns it into a clear picture. This helps professionals to grab actionable insights, drive their strategies, optimize campaigns, and ultimately empower business growth.
But how can one ensure that reporting is truly effective and enlightening? In this article, we’ll look at common issues in marketing reporting, how to avoid those potholes and some solid ways to improve the handling and presentation of your data.
Article Shortcuts:
- Marketing Reporting Challenges (and How to Fix Them)
- Marketing Performance Reporting Done Right
- Recap: Marketing Reporting FAQ
Ready to transform your data into decisions? Read along to see how to drive home the best from your marketing reporting skills and enable your data to work for you.
Marketing Reporting: Quick Overview
Source: Looker Studio
Marketing reporting represents data collection, analysis, and performance presentation of various marketing efforts, usually done to check on results and help inform further decisions.
Solid marketing reports enable a business to leverage marketing funnel analytics: monitor campaigns, establish which strategies are proving effective, and then tweak future activity for an enhanced return on investment.
Marketing reports will fall into one of two categories:
- Reports by period: This could be a weekly, monthly, or quarterly report, usually representing an overview of campaign performance in that given period. Periodic reporting provides teams with an opportunity to track key metrics, observe trends, and measure the effectiveness of their marketing over a longer period.
- Channel-specific reports: These would detail the performance of key indicators based on a specific channel, like social media, email, SEO, or paid ads. With these reports showing each channel’s performance, marketers can then know how to allocate their budgets and resources so they can focus on the highest-performing platforms.
In both cases, reporting is a vital part of marketing analytics. The analysis of your efforts is the right way to tune up your strategy and improve performance.
Marketing Reporting Challenges (and How to Fix Them)
Even though marketing reporting is central to making decisions, it often comes with various obstacles marketers must face. Let's look into some common digital marketing reporting challenges and practical solutions to overcome those obstacles.
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Data is everywhere
Source: ActiveCampaign
Marketing data is everywhere: website metrics, CRM systems, ad platforms, project management tools, and many other sources are likely to load marketers with info.
All this undoubtedly provides good insight, but the volume of data is becoming somewhat overwhelming.
Also, the multiplying number of marketing tools adds to the complexity of digital marketing reporting. There’s just so much that it is increasingly hard for them to pick out the important data points.
Solution: You should streamline data collection and focus on the right metrics foremost. For this, you can automate data integration and collection with ready-made software.
Firstly, proper data collection helps you create stable data flows. This provides a holistic view of campaign performance through the various touchpoints. Team members can see how each channel contributes to overall success.
Second, focus on the metrics that directly tie to your goals. Don't report on all data points possible. Focus on five to seven KPIs that truly align with your goals so that reports become easier to manage and more actionable. This would be a good starting point.
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Lack of resources and skills
Source: Medium
Most marketing teams still rely on manual reporting processes, which are time-consuming and prone to human error. Apart from the fact that manually compiling data from different sources drains finite resources, it also makes the creation of timely reports much more difficult.
Additionally, some teams lack the technical skills required for compiling reports or the usage of advanced reporting tools.
Solution: Again, automation plays an important role here. Automate processes to reduce manual work and minimize the possibility of errors.
Marketing reporting tools can fetch data from a variety of platforms and generate customized reports, which update in real-time. This relieves the need for manual gathering and frees up marketers for analysis and strategy innovations instead.
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Random reporting
Some marketers may work in a reactive mode, generating reports only when the need arises. However, this causes poor reporting practices and results in missed opportunities for optimization.
Besides, it may be a substantial blocker for decision-making leading. The absence of regular reporting also means teams cannot have access to real-time performance data; thus, insights become outdated.
Solution: Establish a reporting cadence. Schedule regular reports, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Scheduled reports are bound to keep the information flowing as you continuously work on monitoring performance and adjust your strategy if needed.
In addition to scheduled reports, marketers can use real-time dashboards that refresh data automatically.
The importance of such dashboards is that they can show the performance of a campaign at any moment in time and enable them to make rapid changes where necessary.
Source: Looker Studio
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Structure of reports
Probably the biggest complaint of any marketing report is that there’s too much data.
Marketers often try to cram all available data into reports, which leads to a report that is not easily readable or usable in informing decisions. Alternatively, reports are sometimes overly simplified and may not provide enough insight to inform strategy.
Solution: Instead of presenting all the available data, focus on the audience and only important information. Your reports should be based on the objective and structured to answer concrete questions.
Many reporting solutions allow you to transform your data, turning it into a convenient format and presenting it professionally.
It's also essential to use data visualization techniques to make your reports more user-friendly.
Graphs and charts will explain intensive data in simple, understandable formats that enable stakeholders to see where they should reinforce their efforts.
Use dashboard templates to properly structure your reports. This is the easiest way to showcase your data effectively.
Marketing Performance Reporting Done Right
We explored key challenges with reports and how to deal with them. Simply speaking, there are three main pillars of effective marketing performance reporting:
Source: original image
- Accessibility. The reports should be accessible to all relevant stakeholders with ease. Using self-service analytics tools and cloud-based reporting drives teamwork, sharing of insights, and making data-driven decisions from any location.
- Visualization. The visual representation of data simplifies its interpretation and makes reports appealing. Presented data in a suitable visual format gives marketers the ability to interact with a report, grasp key metrics, and find trends in their data. It's important for timely decisions in a current dynamic business environment.
- Customization. Pre-built marketing reporting templates offer a jumping-off point and cover most of reporting needs. At the same time, report customization based on campaign specifics or requests from stakeholders can bring your reporting to the next level. Adapt reporting to reflect unique objectives and metrics specific to that campaign to make reports relevant and clear.
It means marketing reports are supposed to form a basis on which informed decisions can be made to show the teams where improvement is needed, where growth opportunities exist, and how to optimize campaigns for better performance.
If done right, marketing reports are an important part of marketing strategy. They give agility, help with the optimization of marketing efforts, and impact strategic decisions. Overall, the clarity and information that reports provide is one of the most powerful tools in driving business growth.
Recap: Marketing Reporting FAQ
1. What are the benefits of marketing reporting?
Reports allow marketers to measure and amplify the ROI, track other crucial metrics, optimize their active efforts for better performance, and plan upcoming activities across all marketing channels.
If done regularly, marketers can also find gaps and weak points in their efforts, which allows them to address them proactively.
2. What are the major pain points related to marketing reporting?
These are the common reporting pains that many marketers may have:
- tools and data overload can make reporting complex or blocked, especially in the early stages
- limited resources and lack of skills lead to manual, time-consuming, and errorful analytics
- no streamlined reporting approach (random and static reports) doesn't bring the full value of data
- no proper report structuring and visualization omission make reports hard to understand
3. How can reporting tools simplify the process?
Marketing reporting tools can help solve common challenges.
Such platforms have unified data from multiple sources, auto-updated reports, and dashboard templates, making the development of actionable reports streamlined.
Using such software usually doesn't require specific skills. By reviewing available solutions and choosing the one that fits your needs, you can start with reporting efficiently.
4. How can I align marketing reports with business goals?
It has to come from your business strategy and the marketing channels you use. Define the most important KPIs per channel, monitor them to understand how they contribute to your goal.
For example, if you want to increase the number of paid users, you invest in SEO and content marketing. Monitoring and improving website traffic and conversion rates impact the accomplishment of your goal.
So, you should focus your reports on such metrics and regularly track how they change and how the goal progresses. If something goes wrong with these metrics, you can investigate further and optimize your activities.
Author Bio
Ivan Burban is the Head of Marketing at Coupler.io, a reporting automation and data analytics platform. He has over 12 years of experience in digital marketing and product management. Ivan strongly believes that marketing is the first driver of business growth and is always ready to share his knowledge. Connect with Ivan on LinkedIn.
