Big or small, every business wants to generate leads and revenue. For that, we do a market analysis and come up with a marketing strategy that will help to achieve the result.
Whether you’re a business owner or a marketing specialist working with clients, you’ll need to write marketing analysis reports on a timely basis to ensure that you’re on the right path to business success.
In this article, you’ll find a guide on the top five marketing analysis reports you might need to build a solid strategy for strong business performance.
What Is a Marketing Analysis Report?
A marketing analysis report is a set of data you gather to track, analyze, and measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. You need all this info to see if your business performance is on track and if you need to optimize something for better results.
Marketing analysis reports are many. Depending on your business goals and KPIs, you might need to write SEO reports, social media analytics reports, marketing performance reports, etc. You can structure reports as presentations, graphs, or Excel spreadsheets, but the best way would be to use automated yet customizable graph-filled reports from your preferred reporting tool.
A marketing analysis report provides you with a clear insight into KPIs and is your foundation for increasing conversions. Before building it, answer some big questions:
- What are your business goals?
- What are your marketing goals?
- What are your KPIs?
- What metrics do you need to analyze the performance: SEO, content, social media, SEM, web analytics, or maybe anything else?
- How frequently will you need to get reports: every week, month, or maybe a quarter?
- Who will see and analyze these reports: you, your marketing team, or your clients?
Regardless of your answers, your every marketing analysis report should be clear, concise, with all the necessary KPIs, and easy to understand.
Why Use a Marketing Analysis Report
The fact speaks for itself: a marketing analysis report allows you to organize and measure all business data for further optimization of your marketing activities.
If you are an agency, the benefits of using marketing analysis reports also include a better interaction with clients and educating them about all the marketing efforts you put on their campaigns.
And now, let’s dive in more detail. Marketers and digital agencies need marketing analysis reports to:
Analyze All the Data
Writing reports regularly, you’ll save time on marketing analysis. With all the data ready at hand, it’s easy to track, measure, and compare past and present results.
Reports allow you to see the business performance over time. And with all the marketing reports templates available, you won’t need to generate all the previous data again and again.
Organize and Optimize Marketing Activities
Organizing your marketing reports daily, weekly, or monthly, you can see how effective and data-driven your strategy is. Reports demonstrate which tactics are working and which aren’t, helping you prioritize some marketing activities for better results.
Thanks to marketing analysis reports, you will see what practices are “dead” and better stop implementing, and which ones still can be optimized.
Interact With Clients
For SEO agencies, efficient communication with clients is critical. Providing them with marketing analysis reports, you’ll demonstrate the status of current campaigns and be able to discuss the metrics.
When a client sees KPIs and all the results by visual demonstration, they can get engaged in the conversation and discuss the next steps and budgets with you.
Educate Clients on Marketing Efforts
Some clients might not understand the meaning of KPIs and why they matter to their marketing. Writing and demonstrating them a report, you’ll be able to explain all your marketing endeavors.
Also, a marketing analysis report is a great way to prove to clients that your tactics and strategies bring the intended results for business development.
5 Types of Marketing Analysis Reports to Consider
Marketing is all about numbers. You combine data across different platforms to measure and continuously improve your strategies. With so many templates available, it’s easy to get misplaced: Which ones to choose?
It all depends on your KPIs. What metrics do you need to consider for analyzing your global marketing strategy and performance?
These are the top five marketing analysis reports specialists use:
1) Digital Marketing Report
To start with, track all your marketing efforts in one place. A comprehensive marketing report, including the data on traffic, email marketing, social media presence, and ad campaigns, allows you to monitor and get an overview of all strategies together.
What are your KPIs for this report?
- Traffic sources, to see how users get to your website and what channel they prefer.
- Bounce rate, to see how many people come to your page and leave it without going to other pages on the website.
- Goal completion, to see conversions from Google Analytics and understand how well you achieve predetermined objectives.
- Campaign performance, to measure CPC, CTR, and revenue.
- Conversion rate, to see how many users achieve the desired goal on the website (sign up, subscribe, purchase, etc.)
Feel free to customize your digital marketing report template and add other KPIs to it.
2) Web Analytics Report
This marketing analysis report includes all key metrics you or your clients might want to track. It’s about the overall performance of your website online.
And while some marketers take all the data from Google Analytics directly and spend time on combining and analyzing it, web analytics report templates organize a whole lot of data fast in one place.
Consider the following web analytics KPIs for this report:
- Sessions & users, including new users, bounce rate, page views, session duration, and more.
- Geo & demographics, to understand your target audience better.
- Channel performance, to track results by traffic source and acquisition channel.
- Landing page & browser performance, to track and analyze user experience at your website.
- Conversion, to track the results and see if you reach your global marketing goals.
3) Marketing Performance Report
This report is about the performance and ROI of your advertising campaigns in Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and any other advertising tools you use to grow your or your client’s business results.
In a marketing performance report, focus on the following KPIs:
- Ad cost, to see the amount of money spent on a particular ad or a whole campaign.
- Ad clicks, to understand how many times users clicked on the ad.
- Ad impressions, to see the number of times your ad was shown.
- Click-through rate (CTR), to see the percentage of clicks that led to conversions.
- Conversions, to see the number of conversions and determine the ROI.
When you see and can compare the performance of your every ad campaign, you’ll be able to pinpoint the highest ROI and optimize others accordingly. The campaign summary helps to measure costs and understand if it’s worth using the same strategy again.
4) SEO Report
SEO, aka search engine optimization, is an integral part of every marketing strategy. Specialists in SEO agencies gather data from on-page metrics and tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, and others to see what’s going on with their websites online.
For your SEO report, you might want to include KPIs such as:
- Organic sessions, to see how much of your traffic comes from organic search; here, you can add metrics like visits, bounce rate, load time, and more.
- Organic conversions, to see your revenue and transactions from organic.
- Organic landing pages, to see which of them generate traffic.
- Organic keywords, to see which of them perform best by clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position.
You need SEO reports to understand the amount of traffic and conversion your website and its landing pages bring, as well as the type of this traffic and its overall role for your global marketing strategy.
5) Social Media Report
Social media is about many different platforms, and you or your client might want to work with several of them. Instagram and Facebook are the most popular today, but YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter aren’t going to give up too.
Sure thing, you want to see the report on your work with each separate social media platform. But it’s also critical to organize and measure the results of how they work together toward a common goal. That’s where a social media report template can help.
Include four main types of KPIs to this report:
- Likes & followers, to see how many users liked your marketing content and followed your profiles.
- Impression & reach, to see how many users saw your content in their feeds.
- Engagement, to see how engaged your social media audience is. Do they click, share, or comment on your posts? Do they watch the videos you publish?
- Top-performing posts, to see which of your content performs best.
You need this report to track your business performance on social media, demonstrate your strategy results to clients, and optimize your social media content calendars and overall campaigns accordingly.
How Frequently to Write a Marketing Analysis Report
Here you need to set expectations from the very beginning.
While it might make sense to check organic traffic or social media engagement weekly (or even daily), you may not need to send these to clients. They would better see your monthly report on web analytics or marketing performance. Everything depends on the KPIs you specified for your campaign: For some, it will be hard to see any movement weekly.
So, send high-level metrics monthly and think of creating a more in-depth marketing analysis report quarterly. Monthly and quarterly reports are preferable to clients as they can see what to expect in the long term.
Long story short:
- write daily and weekly marketing analysis reports for yourself and your team to understand short-term changes and correlations,
- create monthly reports for clients,
- and come up with quarterly digital marketing reports or executive reports for your top management if asked.
Conclusion
Marketing analysis reports are your must-have to analyze all critical metrics and see if your campaigns are on the right course. Whether a business owner or a marketing specialist working with clients in agencies, you need to stay in the know of every KPI change so you could optimize strategies accordingly.
The five marketing analysis reports from this article will help you and your clients gain better insight into marketing strategies that work best on brand performance online.
Lesley Vos
Lesley is a seasoned web writer, specializing in sales copywriting, content marketing, and storytelling. Currently blogging at Bid4Papers, she also contributes to publications on business, digital marketing, and self-growth.
