From Data to Insights: How to create meaningful marketing reports
PPC and SEO reporting process can be hard. Data is everywhere, and it’s not always easy to collect and put it into an easy-to-understand format. It’s often challenging to make sense of all the information. Yet reporting is important. Marketing agencies need actionable insights, and their clients expect to see campaign results.
The problem with the reports is that they do not always communicate important insights. Luckily, there are ways to fix it. The following reporting tips can help you transform your data into meaningful marketing reports.
1. Define important business objectives.
Include goals in the report so there’s no question about what you’re measuring and why. It will help stay focused on the most important things. For example, vanity metrics like Facebook shares or likes on Instagram should not be the thing to look at constantly if the recurring revenue has been decreasing for several months.
2. Use automation for reporting.
Reporting takes time. A SEO and PPC reporting automation platform will help you save it. Octoboard is one good choice for your agency for building automated client reporting. It saves time by allowing agencies like yours to connect to any PPC or SEO tool that your clients may use — from Google Analytics to Social Networks, PPC and Email Marketing platforms — and start collecting data and generating reports automatically every week or monthly.
3. Explain results
Reporting should not be narrowed down to gathering data and creating charts. In addition to showing the “what,” you must also be able to explain the “why.” Looking at reports you should be able to explain anomalies or changing trends. If there’s a sudden spike or a dip, or if you detect a trend, you need to dig deeper to see what’s driving it. When your audience sees the anomaly or trend, “What happened?” is going to be the first question they ask.
4. Show results
It is important to present results in the most impactful and easy-to-understand and visual way. For each result you include in your report, consider the optimal way to show it. Understand the different types of charts and graphs so you can select the one that’s most appropriate for your data. And look for ways to combine multiple related data points within one chart to show relationships and correlations.
5. Add context
The point of a report is to communicate results, but results often require context to have meaning. Your clients needs to know exactly what you measured, why it matters, and whether the results are good. Define the metrics that you used in your report. Also help your audience understand how to gauge the results they’re seeing by including benchmarks — historical averages or explicit goals.
6. Align reports for your clients
Just because you have data doesn’t mean you should include it in your report. If you’re sharing results with your client’s operational team, then you may want to show lots of detailed operational stats to help manage and measure the results. But if your primary audience is the executive team, focus on key business results and provide lots of context.
7. Show how results will guide future activities
Creating marketing reports is often the process of looking back to see what happened. But what’s the point if you’re not going to use that information to help your clients do better in the future? Each reporting cycle should give you insight about what is or is not working. Include key learnings, and describe how you are planning to use them in your marketing campaigns.
Work on your marketing reports so you can deliver better and more effective results that provide more insight to optimize campaigns, which in turn helps to improve outcomes. Try Octoboard today to save time creating reports!
Originally published at www.octoboard.com on September 19, 2018.
