Business leaders and marketing professionals agree: marketing efforts drive business growth. However, ask either party how, why, and to what degree marketing activities affect sales, and the answer can get complicated.
You can run multiple campaigns at a time, but without a structured reporting system, the marketing data generated by these campaigns can feel less like a record of your successes and more like a general soup of information. For this reason, many companies use the marketing campaign reporting process to compile, organize, and analyze marketing data. Here’s what a marketing report is and how to compile one.
What is a marketing report?
A marketing report helps you assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and make informed decisions. It is a document or presentation that provides an overview of a company’s marketing performance during a given reporting period. Ecommerce marketing reports typically include updated key performance indicators (KPIs) and highlight trends and insights observed during the period. In some cases, they can also contain relevant data analysis, projections, and research findings.
Benefits of marketing reports
- Recognize marketing successes
- Identify missed opportunities
- Efficiently allocate budgets
- Align internal teams
A good marketing report can help you monitor key metrics and gain valuable insights into how your marketing department's performance supports progress toward your business goals.
Recognize marketing successes
Preparing and delivering a marketing report can help marketing teams and business owners take a step back from day-to-day tasks to evaluate what works (and what doesn’t). One outcome of this process is an opportunity to identify and celebrate your team’s successes and use this information to inform future campaigns.
For example, if 50% of your new leads within a particular reporting period came from three blog posts, you might conclude blogging is a promising tactic. You can then dig deeper into successful posts to look for patterns in content type and subject matter, and use your findings to refine your content marketing strategy.
Identify missed opportunities
While celebrating a job well done is important, reviewingmarketing metrics can also help you identify holes in your strategy. For example, if your social media engagement data shows that a key segment of your target audience isn’t interacting with your content, you might rethink your strategy to reach this demographic.
Efficiently allocate budgets
Reports can help you quantify the impact of your marketing investments. A comprehensive overview of marketing results can help you make informed decisions about future budget allocations. This includes how much money to allocate to marketing as a whole and how to distribute funds across marketing strategies.
For example, if your return on investment (ROI) for influencer marketing partnerships is five times greater than your average marketing ROI, you might increase spending on this tactic and reduce spending on others.
Align internal teams
Marketing reports can facilitate cross-departmental collaboration. Many marketing teams distribute reports to product development, customer service, and sales teams, increasing transparency and encouraging employees to share insights across departments.
Marketing data can also help teams that work with marketing manage workflows. For example, incorporating anticipated sales-qualified leads for the upcoming quarter in your report can enable your sales team to better strategize.
How often should you create a marketing report?
Reporting frequency varies by company, report type, and purpose. Although daily marketing reports are rare, many teams use weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports. Here’s an overview of when to consider each option:
Weekly marketing reports
Marketers use weekly reports to monitor active, short-term campaigns (such as holiday sales events) and make data-driven adjustments to optimize results. Granular in nature, weekly reports help individual teams keep tabs on day-to-day performance.
For example, a social media marketing team might pull important metrics like post reach, engagement, and click-through-rate (CTR) data weekly to determine whether their campaign is on track, identify high- and low-performing posts, and spot relevant performance trends.
Monthly marketing reports
Monthly marketing reports help align entire marketing departments on common, medium-term goals. A month is typically enough time to reveal meaningful performance trends, but monthly reports are also frequent enough to allow in-depth data analysis and support mid-course adjustments to ongoing campaigns.
Monthly reporting also makes it easy to compare performance to the same month in the previous year. For example, a retail company might compare November 2024 data to November 2023 data to contrast both years’ seasonal uptick in sales.
Quarterly marketing reports
Longer reporting periods encompass more data and summarize high-level trends, making them ideal for company-wide meetings. Because of the volume of data, quarterly reports tend to focus on broad outcomes over granular details, making them useful for monitoring long-term progress. The broader scope of data also minimizes statistical anomalies and improves the accuracy of future performance predictions based on historical outcomes. Like monthly reports, quarterly reports also facilitate year-over-year comparisons.
For example, a CMO might present the quarterly report at the Q1 all-hands meeting, informing employees across departments about the marketing team’s successes and insights into customer behavior.
What to include in a marketing report
General marketing reports typically include a strategy overview, a highlights section, an overview of marketing activities, and an analytics section. Here’s what to include in each:
Strategy
Provide high-level information about the marketing strategy relevant to the report, including information about goals, budgets, target audiences, and marketing channels. Orienting report readers to your marketing strategy provides context that can help them interpret report data.
Highlights
Including a highlights section allows you to showcase your success and provides readers skimming the report with key takeaways. You might include particularly strong or improved KPIs, high-performing tactics or content types, and information about relevant trends in the data.
Initiatives
Provide details about the marketing initiatives covered in the report. Include information about marketing campaigns, events, and any major projects, like updating your site content or brand messaging.
Analytics
Include key channel and campaign analytics, such as:
- Social media marketing analytics. Your social media marketing report should include key metrics from social media channels such as post reach, engagement rates, and click-through rates (CTR). You can pull this data directly from social media platforms or a social media analytics tool.
- Email marketing analytics. Include email campaign metrics like open rate, CTR, bounce rate, new subscribers, total subscribers, and unsubscribe rate. Many email marketing platforms, like Shopify Email and Mailchimp, make it easy for marketers to access campaign data and run reports.
- Website analytics. Most digital marketing reports include web performance data, including website traffic metrics like total site visits, unique visitors, average time on page, and bounce rate. You can also provide data on referral sources. For example, you can use Google Analytics to review traffic from your email newsletter, social media channels, and search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Search engine optimization analytics. SEO involves tweaking your site’s structure and content to improve its performance in search engine rankings and increase relevant traffic to your online store. Popular metrics include keyword rankings, number of backlinks, domain authority score, and information about organic site traffic and conversions. You can pull website data from Google Analytics or use an SEO tool with analytics and reporting capabilities to access this information.
- Advertising campaign analytics. Some marketing reports also contain information about specific advertising campaigns. The content and data-gathering methods of your digital marketing report vary according to the advertising strategies you use. For example, you might use Google Ads to generate a pay-per-click report, or PPC marketing report, and rely on an external ad vendor to provide metrics for ads placed through the third-party platform. Common advertising campaign metrics include total impressions, cost per impression (CPI), and cost per click (CPC).
Marketing reporting FAQ
How do you write a marketing campaign report?
Here’s how to create a marketing report in five steps:
1. Identify the report's audience and purpose.
2. Determine your reporting period.
3. Gather key marketing metrics.
4. Organize data by channel, tactic, and type.
5. Include brief analysis where applicable.
If this is your first time creating a marketing report, you can review marketing report examples or use a reporting template to help you structure your findings.
What is a market report in marketing?
A market report is an organized presentation of market research findings; it provides an overview of a company’s marketing performance. Although marketing reports are typically data-driven, some include research findings as well (i.e., a report on a specific market).
What tools can you use to create marketing reports?
Many marketing and ecommerce platforms provide reporting tools to make it easier for teams to create effective marketing reports. Shopify allows users to automatically generate reports using customized marketing report templates.
