To effectively track digital marketing effectiveness, you need all types of regular reports: annual, monthly, weekly or daily. In this article, we share examples of marketing reports that can help in your work.

Maryna Sharapa

Sep 4, 2020·5 min read

Tracking the success of digital marketing activities allows you not only to understand whether your website brings new customers and sales but also to receive in-depth information about which channels work, in which growth zones it’s worth investing, and where to stop wasting your budget.

For effective tracking, you need properly configured marketing dashboards that show the necessary KPIs in clear and understandable graphs, charts, and tables. This approach allows you to evaluate the success of your advertising campaigns at a glance.

There are many ways to create a marketing progress dashboard. The tool used usually depends on the size and requirements of the business: small companies prefer Excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets, and Google Analytics (plus sometimes ETL services), while mid-sized and large companies need automatic raw data collection plus business intelligence solutions such as Power BI and Tableau. And don’t forget that data visualization services should be used in conjunction with a service such as OWOX BI for collecting, cleaning, and merging raw unsampled data.

What is a marketing report?

For marketers, a report is often either a page in a spreadsheet or a dashboard in one of many visualization services. It allows you to use previously collected data to answer specific questions.

To provide it, you need to:

• collect and structure your marketing and business data;
• define metrics;
• regularly check the relevance and quality of your data;
• use a service to create your marketing reports.

Types of marketing reports

To avoid the well-known end-of-the-month syndrome, a burning keyboard, and convulsive attempts to collect data into a report, let’s figure out what types there are. Most often, reports are compiled:

• annually
• monthly
• weekly
• daily
• on demand

It’s worth noting that annual, monthly, weekly, and daily marketing evaluation reports are most often prepared in the form of dashboards, while on-demand reports are usually assembled using spreadsheets.

Different reports are required at different times, for different purposes, and for different people. Ideally, you should be prepared for everything in advance.

Examples of annual marketing reports

Annual reports such as marketing strategy dashboards are required by CMOs and CEOs. These reports focus on the overall performance of your department, your strategy, and your goals for the past year. Here’s a sample of a manager dashboard:

A marketing dashboard usually reflects the status of all key indicators and compares them against the plan and the previous year’s performance.

Examples of monthly marketing reports

Unlike annual reports (which are general) and weekly reports (which are detailed), monthly reports provide an overview of information for the period of a few weeks that’s required for marketing insights.

For example, if in a weekly dashboard one channel brings the most leads, this doesn’t necessarily mean these leads will be of high quality. You can only find out in a couple of weeks.

For example, with the dashboard below from OWOX BI, you can track your monthly marketing and sales plan. Such a dashboard needs to show your marketing plan and effectiveness in terms of metrics that are of interest to your company (ROI, CRR, revenue, etc.).

To find valuable insights, you need to configure a dashboard in a reporting service (Google Data Studio, Power BI, Tableau, OWOX BI) or use ready-made samples from AskGA by OWOX.

Examples of weekly marketing reports

Thanks to weekly traffic monitoring, you won’t miss any “trouble” that can affect the results of your department. Data collected over the course of a week helps you make decisions that affect monthly progress and form the basis for future decisions.

As with annual and monthly reports, weekly ones are best prepared in the form of dashboards or premade templates. For example, the AskGA service by OWOX helps you dig deeper into your data. Simply choose the question you want to answer, select the necessary dataset in Google Analytics, and get a dashboard with tables and graphs in less than a minute.

Examples of daily marketing reports

A daily report helps you make fast, data-informed decisions. You can use such reports to plan your actions, as their results allow you to react in almost real time to any errors, allowing you to save money and redistribute your budget. For example, monitoring on advertising campaigns can allow you to disable inefficient campaigns. You can quickly fix other issues as well with reports on website errors, unavailable items, etc.

With a daily checking, you can track small experiments and notice problems before they grow into global difficulties. In addition, daily tracking allows you to be confident in your numbers and know the current state of affairs.

Of course, the results of one day don’t affect the results of an entire advertising campaign. However, changes over several days in a row can show a trend. Although you shouldn’t get too attached to daily reports, it’s a good practice to check the most important metrics every day.

Use different types of digital marketing reports to track your activities and goals. Using dashboards, it will be easier for you to get useful insights, identify risk zones, and draw conclusions.