A digital marketing report is essential for any business that wants to generate new customers and sales. A successful marketing strategy includes modern business intelligence software and digital marketing reports that provide detailed data insights. As a result, you’ll be able to understand key metrics better and lay the groundwork for increasing conversions.

Marketing, sales, and financial management would be impossible without reports.  Marketing KPIs are a good starting point for you. But the next step is to organize them to make sense and add value to the business. 

This article will tell you everything about digital marketing reports: What, Why, and How. Plus, we will share free templates and tell you how to create digital marketing reports using these templates with just few clicks of the mouse.

Note: All the digital marketing report templates shown in this article is created by FineReport, a powerful BI Reporting Software that has been honorably mentioned by Gartner Magic Quadrant for ABI Platforms in 2023. You can download FineReport for free and have a try!

What is A Digital Marketing Report?

A digital marketing report is a collection of data used to assess the success of a particular marketing campaign or effort. In other words, it’s used to communicate a company’s marketing strategy, including research, promotional tactics, goals, and expected outcomes.

You can monitor your progress and improve various marketing procedures thanks to marketing reporting.

Why do Businesses Need A Digital Marketing Report?

Connecting All Data Sources

As a marketing manager, you’re familiar with the tedium of manually compiling data and compiling reports to track your progress. However, data from multiple sources can be consolidated using professional business dashboards. It can also reduce the risk of human error in the reporting process by eliminating the need for manual work.

Achieving Insights into Audiences’ Behavior

They provide information on how users interact with your website, app, and other online properties. There are several ways where you can learn more about your target customer. For example, what type of mobile or desktop device your customer uses and how much they are willing to spend on a product or service and where they are most likely to purchase.

Tracking Campaign Performance

Another benefit of marketing reporting is campaign tracking. You’ll be able to tell which activities were successful and which were not by using modern digital marketing reports to track the performance of your strategies. As a result, your efforts will be better focused. You will save money and time due to your improved performance.

Justifying Marketing Expenses and Defining Budgets

Every business has a budget for marketing, and managers are responsible for reporting it to the CEO or other relevant executives. Thus, using a modern report, you can justify expenses and set budgets based on historical trends and data from previous periods.

Developing Global Marketing Strategies

You can benefit greatly from professional reports if your company operates in multiple countries or markets. Language, geography, and demographics are all factors to consider when developing a global marketing strategy. If you use modern marketing reports, you can see all this information in real-time and use it to develop global strategies for your company tailored to each market segment’s specific needs.

Achieving Business Goals

For your business success, marketing reporting will be a crucial part of it. In other words, an investment in marketing analysis software will help you make better business decisions based on information rather than just gut feeling, resulting in an increased return on investment.

Types of Digital Marketing

Social Media Marketing

You need social media marketing to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. That is to say, an effective social media strategy includes creating and sharing engaging content, listening to and engaging with your audience, analyzing the results, and running paid social media advertisements. Moreover, there are currently six major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a specific audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. As an alternative to pitching your products or services, you provide your customers and prospects with content that is truly relevant and helpful in solving their problems.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, also referred to as SEO (search engine optimization), is an Internet marketing technique that involves increasing the visibility of websites in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily using paid advertisements. So to speak, SEO is the process of adjusting or rewriting website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages. You can improve pay per click (PPC) listings, and incorporate into SEM campaigns to increase click-through rates.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel that uses email to promote your company’s products or services. In other words, it is a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing. Integrating it into your marketing automation efforts can help customers become aware of new products or special offers. Additionally, various marketing emails can also play an important role in your lead generation, brand awareness, relationship building, or customer engagement strategy.

The key indicators for each of the four types of reports are markedly different. This article will introduce you to the specific indicators that can help you grow your company in greater detail later.

How to write a digital marketing report?

What Should a Digital Marketing Report Include?

You should include a few essential categories in your digital marketing report when creating it. So that even someone without marketing experience can quickly scan the report for the information they desire. Moreover, you should present them in a way that is both impressive and forthright.

The following are the top 10 things that should be included in every digital marketing report:

Summary Page

The best way to get someone to open up to you is to show them a nice summary or highlight page first. When writing a report, make sure this section is at the top. Therefore, you want to focus on the most important metrics and a project overview that is concise and to the point in the summary.

After reviewing the report, your client should have a general idea of their marketing and their future goals. Thus, everything that follows should substantiate the points made in the preceding paragraph.

Because not everyone is an expert in marketing, it’s important to keep the jargon simple and understandable to understand the message.

‍Present Marketing Strategy

Even though you are likely well-versed in this marketing strategy, many of the executives and stakeholders in the company may not be. Hence, a section dedicated to the core marketing strategy is required. it would help if you addressed the following questions in this section:

• Who am I trying to reach with my product or service?

• What are the most popular channels? Do they serve as the primary means of marketing?

• What are the company’s growth opportunities?

• To what extent are we currently working?

Here, you can easily explain why the client chose you. Make sure the project’s scope is clearly defined and that you’re delivering on your promises to the client.

Bring it all together by giving an update on the marketing strategy’s progress over the past month. First, of course, there is always the desire to market oneself. If you’ve made any changes to the marketing strategy, be sure to explain why. Then, close with a statement about how the changes will benefit the organization in the upcoming months.

Conversion Metrics

Now that you’ve warmed up the client with some overviews and common jargon, it’s time to get to the numbers that every CEO wants to know – conversion metrics. For example, if you want to show how your campaigns meet or exceed growth goals and projections, you should focus on conversion metrics. However, if you want this section to be more effective, make it as clear as possible. 

Lead Acquisition

Keep track of the leads you’ve generated through digital marketing efforts. Especially, if you’re working with an organization that prioritizes new customers. To be more specific, show your client where the leads came from, whether it was SEO or PPC, so they can see where their marketing investment is paying off the most.

Break Down by Channel and Device

Subsequently, knowing where your website traffic is coming from is essential. It is also important to know how long those leads are lingering before they either buy or leave. For example, do most of your website’s visitors arrive via email, referrals, or ads on social media?

In this case, you can demonstrate to your client that, for example, the bounce rate on mobile is significantly higher than that of the website. It is clear to the client that the mobile site needs to be reworked or optimized. If some posts are performing better than others, you’ll discover why. 

Search Engine Marketing

This will differ depending on the SEO services provided by your company. For example, do you focus on link building, or do you also optimize on-site? Either way, make sure to give a quick rundown of how your rankings have improved, and then back it up with specifics on how you got there. Include a table highlighting the month’s new backlinks.

PPC Endeavors

Having a section covering the cost per conversion, click-through rate, ad spend, ROI, etc., is essential if you’re running PPC campaigns for a client. Analyze the data and see how it differs from channel to channel. As a result, if the customer is on a tight budget, you can help them out by suggesting where they should spend their money based on the data in this section.

Social Media Marketing

Another aspect of this overall digital marketing report is social media marketing. The importance of social media marketing to today’s businesses cannot be overstated. In this section of the report, be sure to include information about how each platform performed, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, among other things. In addition, make sure to show two important goals, such as attracting new customers via social media and retaining current ones.

Ideas for the Future

People are more likely to stick around if they know that you have plans for the future. In this case, to entice them to stay on board with you for the long haul, this is the section where you can show them just how much you have planned. Therefore, if your analytics for the past month has been disappointing, now is your chance to show them that you are committed to pushing the boundaries even further. Re-examine the previous month’s goals and highlight any accomplishments.

Future Budget

Here is where you can discuss the anticipated costs of future promotional campaigns and the anticipated returns. So that your client does not have to do anything but agree, this section should provide a cost analysis for each of your goals.

Using AARRR Model

The AARRR model is widely used in product operation and marketing. As a result, it combines the product’s characteristics and the position of the product’s life cycle to pay attention to various data indicators and, ultimately, develop different operation strategies. The AARRR model stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

• Acquisition: How do users learn about (and come to rely on) your product?

• Activation: What was the user’s first impression?

• Retention: Whether or not users return to the product (reuse)?

• Revenue: How does the product generate revenue (from its users)?

• Referral: Will users be willing to tell other users about you?

Data can be compared horizontally and vertically by disassembling and quantifying all aspects of the entire user life cycle to find the corresponding problems and optimize. For example, the following AARRR model diagram clearly shows that each link will lose users. Therefore, if there is an unusually high attrition rate, you should be aware as a project manager or data analyst.

FineReport has a built-in template for AARRR model plots. You can use it directly after downloading FineReport for free.

Tips for Digital Marketing Report

Anyone tasked with creating or reviewing digital marketing reports knows that the process can be lengthy. So what is the “perfect” digital marketing report? As a digital marketing firm owner or manager preparing reports this week, consider the following best practices:

Reporting to Increase Your Value and Accountability

Delivering reporting assists your product or company improve their business, which we all want. However, it also increases your firm’s credibility and value. With so many indicators in the digital era, it’s easy to get caught up in a debate about what you don’t measure against what you do. As a result, devote time and resources to digital marketing reporting to the best of your ability. The more time you spend on it, the more noticeable it will be, and the higher your client retention. Not to mention that creating these reports makes your company accountable. If you’re slacking, you now know where you’re slacking and how to improve.

Use the Reports, Not Just File Them

All of your marketing and advertising campaigns require the use of these statistics and analytics. In this term, you can make adjustments to your content, demographics, posting schedule, etc., based on the data you collect and report on. As a result, every time you check particular data, you’ll be able to apply what you learn to your digital marketing strategy, which will make your company more successful.

Organize it with Dashboards or a Program

You don’t even have to do it all by hand, as there are programs, support tools, and dashboards that help your teams to understand what they should report and how they should report it. For example, when teams use a dashboard, they are held to a specific set of metrics that they are expected to provide daily, weekly, or monthly.

FineReport is a straightforward tool for creating reports with multiple data sources linked together. Moreover, detailed, grouping, cross-paging, column tree reports, and visual dashboards and large screens are all options in the three report modes.

Digital Marketing Report Templates

Note: All the digital marketing report templates shown in this article are created by FineReport, a powerful BI Reporting Software that has been honorably mentioned by Magic Quadrant for ABI Platforms in 2023. You can download FineReport for free and have a try!

Digital Marketing Report is not simply a summary of various data, but through clear charts and indicators to display important data analysis results to display marketing. If there are abnormal data, it indicates that there are some problems with your business operation, and the company can make adjustments accordingly.

Digital Marketing Reports are often used in conjunction with sales, cost, profit and other related dashboards.

For example, a profit center dashboard is a centralized display of profit-related indicators. Based on this dashboard, the marketing department can select high-profit areas to focus on marketing.

Feel free to download FineReport for more marketing dashboards and use these templates to streamline your marketing work.

Creating a Digital Marketing Report with FineReport

Creating a digital marketing report can be time-consuming and complex, but with the right tools, it doesn’t have to be. FineReport is an excellent reporting tool that makes it easy to create customizable and interactive reports. With FineReport, you can:

• Connect data sources: FineReport allows you to connect to a wide range of data sources, including database tables, SQL sets, Excel, built-in data sets, and more. By connecting your data sources to FineReport, you can quickly import data into your digital marketing report and start analyzing it.

• Choose a report template: FineReport offers a variety of pre-designed digital marketing templates that are specifically tailored to digital marketing reports. You can choose a template that fits your needs and customize it as needed. Of course, you can create your own report at your will without following these templates.
• Customize your report: FineReport offers a range of customization options that allow you to add charts, tables, and other visualizations to your report. You can also add text and images to provide context for your data.
• Define your metrics: Before you start designing your digital marketing report, it’s important to define the metrics that you’ll be tracking. These metrics should align with your campaign goals and help you measure the success of your marketing efforts.
• Cool data visualization: FineReport supports more than 50 chart styles, covering basically all basic and high-level charts on the market, and also has excellent dynamic effects and a powerful interactive experience. Various features can be set according to the needs during use, and can also be self-adjusted and displayed on the mobile terminal and large LED screen.

• Create interactive dashboards: FineReport allows you to create interactive dashboards that allow you to quickly see trends and patterns in your data. You can also set up alerts to notify you when certain metrics reach a specific threshold.
• Automate your reporting: FineReport allows you to automate your reporting process, so you always have up-to-date information at your fingertips. You can set up reports to run on a schedule, and you can also share reports with team members and stakeholders.
• Collaborate with team members: FineReport allows you to collaborate with team members and stakeholders by sharing your digital marketing reports and dashboards. You can also set up user permissions to control who can view and edit your reports.

Conclusion

Digital marketing reporting is the lifeblood of marketing. You can see how well your articles and advertising are doing, as well as much you’re spending or losing. As a result of this research, companies can better understand what extra they can do to connect with customers or whether their targeted audience was incorrect.

Your company and your customer will suffer if you don’t provide this level of reporting. As a result, now is the moment to embrace reporting wholeheartedly.

With FineReport, creating a digital marketing report has never been easier. Try it out today and see how it can help you take your marketing to the next level.

Feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization to transform data into value.