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A properly configured digital marketing report that clearly and understandably shows the necessary KPIs is essential for effective tracking of digital marketing activities. This approach allows for the evaluation of the success of advertising campaigns at a glance.
Marketers are always in need of automated dashboards with up-to-date data. In this article, we share examples of marketing reporting that can make a difference in your work.
Note: This post was originally published in August 2020 and was completely updated in April 2025 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Marketing reports are documents that compile data and insights about marketing activities' performance. They track key metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, campaign ROI, and audience engagement to help businesses assess the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and make informed decisions.
To provide it, you need to:
Effective marketing reports are essential for analyzing and improving the marketing department's performance. They showcase campaign performance, aid in decision-making, and help meet pre-set marketing goals. Essential elements include a summary of marketing strategies, market analysis, promotional information, and data on advertising campaigns. The reports also list established marketing goals and KPIs.
Data Collection and Analysis in marketing involves gathering information about your marketing campaigns and studying it closely. This step is crucial because it tells you what's working and what's not. By looking at things like how many people visit your website or how many buy your product after seeing an ad, you get a clear picture of your marketing strategy's success. This information helps in making smart decisions for future marketing efforts, ensuring that time and money are spent wisely.
Sources of marketing data include advertising cost data, website user behavior (GA4 or OWOX BI Streaming), search patterns, sales and revenue data from crm/erp systems, and other cost data such as affiliate costs, social media data, call tracking, etc.
Collecting all of the valuable information from different sources is crucial for report build-out and effective budget allocation for better campaign effectiveness. Using digital marketing report templates is essential for structuring future online marketing efforts and ensuring a detailed analysis of various metrics.
The process involves gathering and analyzing marketing metrics to inform future marketing strategies and performance. These reports uncover meaningful, actionable data essential for achieving organizational goals. Additionally, these reports assist the marketing team in achieving specific goals and making data-driven decisions.
Metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are like scorecards for your marketing efforts. Selecting the right key metrics is essential for assessing various aspects of digital marketing. They are specific numbers or goals you track to see how well your marketing is doing.
For example, you might look at the number of new customers you get after a particular ad campaign or the increase in sales when you use a new marketing tactic. By focusing on these numbers, you can understand what attracts customers and drives your business’s success, helping you focus your efforts on the strategies that have the biggest impact.
Choosing relevant metrics involves identifying the most important elements based on the marketing campaign's goals and objectives. These important metrics can include traffic sources, conversion rates, revenue, cost per lead, and clicks.
Interpreting KPIs involves evaluating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns against pre-established goals and KPIs. This step is vital for assessing campaign performance and guiding better decision-making.
Data Visualization and Presentation in marketing involve turning data and numbers into easy-to-understand graphs and charts. This is important because it helps everyone in your company, from team members to top bosses, understand what the data means.
Good visualization highlights the key points and findings from your data in the marketing report, making it clear where things are going well and where improvements are needed. This clarity is essential for making informed decisions and planning future marketing strategies.
The right graphs and charts are chosen based on the campaign's goals and objectives, ensuring they provide stakeholders with a concise and valuable overview. Marketing dashboards are handy for this purpose.
A clear and engaging presentation starts with a summary that provides holistic and actionable insights from key data points. The report should highlight primary marketing channels, the report's scope, and the results of marketing initiatives.
By analyzing Marketing Reports, businesses can gain insights into what marketing tactics are working, where they can improve, and how to better allocate their marketing budget. Each type of report focuses on different aspects of marketing and provides specific insights, from tracking sales trends to measuring the impact of social media campaigns. Using a marketing report example is crucial for tracking KPIs and measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Here are a few marketing report examples that provide practical illustrations of how data can be organized and presented to inform marketing decisions and strategies
Sales Performance Reports help businesses track and analyze their sales activities, both online and offline. They reveal trends and areas for improvement, provide insights into overall sales effectiveness, and guide strategic decisions.
These reports typically include:
ROPO Report
Analyze your online and offline sales data with ROPO Dashboard by OWOX BI. Combine offline and online sales data to get an omnichannel view of your business performance.
Social Media Metrics Reports track paid and organic marketing efforts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. A comprehensive social media marketing report evaluates the impact and reach of social media campaigns, tracks engagement, leads generation, and conversion rates, and organizes data by social media platform.
Key elements of these reports include:
Website Traffic and Conversion Reports focus on how visitors interact with a website and their conversion into customers, which is essential for understanding and optimizing online user experience and effectiveness.
Key elements of these reports include:
Here is our Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard Template that tracks all the important marketing KPIs at one place, You can download it here.
Email Marketing Reports analyze the performance of email campaigns, tracking open rates, click-through rates, and overall effectiveness in engaging recipients and driving conversions.
Email Marketing Reports should include:
PPC Reports provide insights into the performance of pay-per-click advertising campaigns, including metrics like leads, revenue, click costs, and conversion rates, crucial for optimizing ad spend.
The PPC marketing reports should include:
OWOX BI’s PPC Dashboard Template tracks all the important metrics for you, download the dashboard for free here.
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 of marketing reporting there are. Most often, reports are compiled:
Using marketing reporting templates can significantly streamline the process of gathering and presenting data to clients, ensuring clarity and effectiveness in communication.
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. A monthly marketing report template can be useful for creating comprehensive reports that highlight ongoing performance metrics.
Note: Before you begin creating dashboards, be sure to determine the main metrics that are important for your business. After determining the marketing metrics that are significant for you, start collecting and merging the data itself. However, be aware that it’s about collecting all marketing data in a single convenient structure from the website, Excel documents, Google Sheets, ad services, Google Analytics, CRM, and call-tracking systems.
Get up-to-date and unified data ready for further segmentation and reporting with OWOX BI.
OWOX BI automatically collects raw data from different ad sources and converts it into a report-friendly format. You’ll get ready-made datasets that are automatically transformed into the proper structure, taking into account nuances important to marketers. No more spending time on data discrepancies and complex transformations. Just focus on data analysis.
Annual marketing reports such as marketing strategy dashboards, are required by CMOs and CEOs. These reports focus on your department's overall performance, strategy, and goals for the past year. In the screenshot below, there's an example of the Performance report, which is used to optimize the sales funnel and find the channels that perform best at a particular stage.
Such a dashboard helps track the fulfillment of the digital sales plan. It displays the KPIs of ad campaigns and compares them to the previous year's plan and results. That means marketers can regularly monitor the dynamics of indicators and quickly make changes to ad campaigns to achieve their goals.
Moreover, with the help of this kind of report, marketers can find bottlenecks in a funnel:
Unlike annual reports (which are general) and weekly reports (which are detailed), monthly marketing reports provide an overview of information for the period of a few weeks that’s required for marketing insights. Like, if in a weekly dashboard one channel brings the most leads, this doesn’t necessarily mean these leads will be of high quality (at least a couple of weeks need to pass before you can find out the actual results).
For example, by using a monthly E-commerce marketing performance report, marketers can track their monthly marketing and sales plans to show effectiveness in terms of metrics that are of interest to their company (ROI, CRR, revenue, etc.).
A monthly dashboard answers these (and more) questions and helps to optimize the marketing budget.
Monthly dashboards make it easy to analyze ad campaigns' effectiveness. Marketers can quickly find out what share of profits is generated by various brands and non-brand campaigns.
It’s also possible to compare the conversion and ROI of advertising campaigns separately for Facebook or any other sources and analyze conversion data from organic traffic to assess the effectiveness of site optimization.
Thanks to weekly traffic monitoring, you won't miss any “trouble” that can affect your department's results. Data collected over the course of a week helps you make decisions that affect monthly progress and form the basis for future decisions.
One example of weekly marketing reporting is evaluating the performance of paid traffic channels. By applying such a report, marketers are able to analyze statistics from Google Ads, Facebook, and other advertising sources on one dashboard.
Say no to switching between reports or manually summarizing data in Excel and Google Sheets, by having a report like this, it's possible to compare the effectiveness of advertising channels on a go.
By using weekly marketing reporting, marketers can compare the efficiency of sources, the profits, costs, displays and clicks, CTR, and ROAS of all traffic sources and draw conclusions about their payback.
Daily marketing reporting helps marketers to make fast, data-informed decisions, allowing them to react in almost real-time to any errors. Daily checking allows tracking small experiments and noticing problems (website errors, unavailable items, etc.) 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, checking the most important marketing metrics every day is a good practice.
For example, marketers can monitor the analysis of advertising campaigns based on item availability report and quickly see the proportion of visits from paid sources in which users land on out-of-stock goods.
Analyzing traffic sources based on merchandise availability helps marketers respond faster to the causes and reduce losses.
Otherwise, the situation could be like this: marketers spend money attracting an audience, but when a user gets to a product card, the item may not be available, meaning that all money spent on this ad campaign goes down the drain.
Any company's analytics and reporting are essential, regardless of size or industry. They help you assess how (and which of) your company's efforts affect sales growth, total revenue, and the overall success of your brand on the market.
Marketing Reporting is crucial to help you tailor your marketing plans and enrich your strategies by repeating your successes, identifying growth opportunities, and avoiding things that have proven ineffective.
Though data is everywhere, it's not always easy to present it in an understandable format. Your marketing campaigns may have excellent results, but if you cannot present those results and prove the success of your campaigns, then your marketing efforts will not be of much use.
The more accurate your measurements are, the higher (and more apparent) the marketing value for your company. Accurate analytics is key to business success. You can't prove your importance, necessity, and value if you don't measure your work. Measuring your work helps you:
The digital marketing landscape is shaken by the following:
The current situation resembles riding out a storm; you don't have time to overcome one wave before the crest of another appears.
As the amount of data marketers use steadily grows, business management wants clear answers to questions: What efforts worked out? Where should we invest to earn more? Answering these questions is impossible without advanced reporting.
Marketing analytics is no longer just a theory or a toy for big rich companies. It has become both more accurate and more urgent. With its help, marketers can defend their budgets, control spending, evaluate marketing efficiency, and, most importantly, use data to improve marketing and meet goals.
The pandemic has boosted online media usage. As Gartner's 2020 research shows, digital channels account for almost 80% of marketing budgets, with digital advertising representing 22% of total spending. Moreover, the customer's path to conversion is becoming more fragmented as customers use more devices to search for brand information.
However, to efficiently use a massive amount of data from these channels, you need to spend a lot of time and resources on creating an analytics system (data storage, connectors, visualization of many different reports for different requests), which is a long, painful, and difficult process.
Data collection alone (handling different data structures and formats and sorting out duplicate or irrelevant data) can take the lion's share of your time. But you still need to put that data to work!
A marketer still needs the help of an analyst to create a report, which can take five days on average. And all this time, the marketer cannot act based on data insights but only on intuition. However, modern all-in-one cloud solutions like OWOX BI make marketers' lives easier.
With an accelerated transition to online marketing (thanks to the pandemic) and an increase in marketing budgets for digital promotion, marketers increasingly have to prove their value.
There's a vast amount of marketing data from various sources that you can use to get many valuable insights. However, analysts are often busy, and most marketers don't know how to build reports on raw data by themselves.
Let's see why it's so crucial for marketers to be able to create various reports using numerous data sources — and to do it on their own.
It's increasingly difficult for marketers to work efficiently, as more and more is being demanded of them. Technologies are developing quickly, and many changes are happening (new Google Analytics 4, third-party data restrictions, etc.); it's simply impossible to follow them all with advertising becoming more expensive and increasing competition.
The magic that can help marketers fulfill their goals and prove their value in the market is called analytics: with the right data, you can get everything you need.
Why don't marketers rely on marketing analytics to make decisions?
Among the main pains that marketers face are:
Let's figure out why these challenges prevent marketers from working effectively.
According to a study, the existing approach isn't just long and unpleasant: the average time to create a report is 4.5 days, and the average cost is $18,000.
And, as if this weren't enough, analysts create different datasets for different reports. Over time, the more reports are built, the more complicated the entire system becomes. It's like playing Jenga; if you pull out the wrong brick (delete or change one data table), everything will collapse in the end.
No one is immune to reporting problems - not even companies with well-tuned analytics, where all possible reports for any taste have long been ready to go. If the data structure changes, all SQL queries must be rewritten.
Fortunately, there's still a way out of this nightmare. Marketers must work with data independently to increase revenues, perform more efficiently, and derive meaningful business benefits. Marketers should be able to build reports on their own using raw data that can be trusted, is complete, and is updated so it contains no errors.
This means you don't have to wait weeks for an analyst to build a report. Instead, you can choose the metrics you need and get a report in a few minutes.
It is not easy for marketers to build reports slightly different from standard templates. Existing analytical products are mainly aimed at the needs of analysts and developers and prohibit marketers from working with data themselves.
Marketers are still forced to limit themselves to ready-made reports or wait for analysts to prepare data, leading to missed opportunities and wasted time.
For example, you can get an automatically updated report in Power BI, Google Data Studio, or Excel. But you cannot do this yourself if you need to change something in the report — add sections, parameters, or metrics or perhaps change the channel grouping. You have to ask an analyst every time.
Who's gonna save your day? Modern marketing reporting tools.
For example, OWOX BI is one of the easiest and most convenient services to work with (according to G2 Crowd reports).
With OWOX BI, you only need an analyst's help initially when creating a customer data model. However, once your marketing data reflects your company's business model, marketers don't need to run to analysts whenever they want to create a new report. Once your data is modeled, marketers can build various reports independently.
More importantly, even if the data structure changes (e.g., with Google Analytics 4), you won't need to rewrite SQL queries since with OWOX BI, such changes won't affect you. The product will take the necessary steps, save you from a boring routine, and free up time to focus on decisions to improve your marketing.
If you want to get all the mentioned above dashboards and get more reports of various complexities, visit the OWOX BI dashboard gallery. There are lots of different and complex templates for marketing reporting that you can receive in a few clicks. Get reports of any depth, compare the effectiveness of marketing channels, and make timely decisions with OWOX BI.
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When interpreting marketing reports, it's vital to adopt best practices that enable a deeper understanding of the data and its implications for business strategy. These practices ensure that the wealth of information available in marketing reports is translated into actionable insights, guiding informed decision-making and strategic planning.
To effectively interpret marketing reports, it's essential to identify trends and patterns in the data. This involves looking for consistent occurrences or changes over time, such as increases in website traffic following specific campaigns or seasonal variations in sales. Recognizing these patterns can help predict future market behavior and inform strategic planning.
Effective interpretation of marketing reports requires a data-driven approach to decision-making. By identifying trends and patterns in the data, businesses can make informed decisions that are grounded in evidence rather than assumptions.
For example, understanding which campaigns consistently drive traffic or increase sales can guide budget allocation and marketing strategies. Moreover, analyzing seasonal variations and other recurring patterns enables businesses to optimize their resources and efforts during peak periods, ensuring more effective and efficient marketing outcomes.
Communicating insights derived from marketing reports requires clarity and precision. After identifying trends and patterns, it is essential to present these findings in a way that stakeholders can easily understand and act upon. This involves summarizing key points, using visual aids like charts and graphs to highlight significant data, and relating the insights to the company's strategic goals.
By effectively communicating these insights, businesses can ensure that data-driven strategies are understood and implemented across the organization, leading to more cohesive and impactful marketing efforts.
Specialists are expected to perform better with fewer resources. This is a real challenge! So, what can marketers do to bolster their confidence in decision-making and gain a holistic view of marketing performance?
Apply templates of dashboards to your regular marketing reporting. With handy templates like those we've mentioned above, it's easy to get a holistic view of marketing performance. And, what's most important, applying such templates can save your time and resources, meaning marketers will have more time to actually analyze the obtained data and get useful insights.
