Top 10 Marketing Reporting Tools for Advertising
Are you leveraging your data to its fullest potential in your advertising campaigns? With 87% of marketers acknowledging that data is their most underutilized asset, the importance of preparedness in reporting cannot be overstated.
This article will guide you through the essential components of effective marketing reports and illustrate how to create them efficiently. You’ll also discover how to build reports easily, avoid extra manual work, and automate the entire process using the ten most popular analytics software, including an automated marketing reporting tool.
Note: This post was initially written in December 2020 and has been comprehensively updated in September 2024 to reflect recent developments.
What are Advertising Reports?
Advertising reports are documents that summarize the performance of advertising campaigns. They track metrics such as reach, clicks, conversions, and ROI to evaluate effectiveness. These reports, often part of digital marketing reporting, help marketers and businesses understand which strategies work, optimize future campaigns, and allocate budgets more efficiently.
These advertising reports often include data from various platforms, providing a comprehensive overview of digital, social media, and traditional advertising efforts. This analysis is crucial for making informed decisions and improving overall marketing success.
Why Advertising Reports Are Important
Advertising reports are essential tools for marketers, providing detailed insights into the performance of their campaigns. Marketing reporting software solutions simplify the reporting process, enable analytics automation, and provide tailored insights for clients, ultimately enhancing decision-making and efficiency in marketing operations.
These reports not only serve to document and report past efforts but play a crucial role in shaping management decisions. The structure and focus of an ad report should be tailored based on its audience, frequency of use, and specific objectives.
Here’s why advertising reports are so important:
- Decision-making: They provide key data that helps managers make informed decisions about future marketing strategies and budget allocations.
- Performance Tracking: Reports enable businesses to monitor the success of their advertising campaigns, identifying which strategies are effective and which are not.
- Budget Management: By analyzing advertising performance, companies can optimize their spending to focus on the most profitable channels and campaigns.
- Customization: The content of an advertising report can be customized to meet the needs of different stakeholders, ensuring that everyone, from executives to marketing managers, receives relevant information.
- Strategic Adjustments: Insights from these reports help businesses adjust their marketing strategies in real time, enhancing their overall effectiveness.
- Market Trends: Advertising reports can reveal trends and patterns in consumer behavior, enabling marketers to better target their audience.
- ROI Measurement: These reports are crucial for calculating the return on investment of advertising campaigns, helping to quantify the financial benefits of marketing efforts.
Components of an Advertising Report: Analyzing Marketing Data
A digital marketing reporting tool can include various elements, each critical to understanding different aspects of a marketing strategy:
- Landing Page Performance: Tracks metrics such as page visits, new contacts, form submissions, and conversion rates.
- Blogging Performance: Measures the number of blog posts published, views received, email subscriptions gained, and RSS subscriber counts.
- Email Performance: Documents the number of emails sent, open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement percentages.
- Facebook Page Performance: Analyzes metrics like page likes, views, overall reach, video views, post engagement, and actions performed on the page.
- Total Leads or Contacts: Lists the types of services provided by marketing activities and the sources of traffic (social, organic, direct) that generated them.
- Source Tracking: Gathers contacts from various channels, using keywords from social media ads, direct URL entries, and other digital advertising efforts.
- Content Performance: Evaluates how engaging, relevant, and well-optimized your website content was, checking if it attracted new visitors and improved your Google ranking.
Identifying Important Metrics in Advertising Reports
Before you start creating a report, you need to figure out which metrics readers of your report are interested in. They should correspond to your business goal.
For example:
- If your goal is to increase the number of advertising clicks, your report should contain the number of clicks and the cost per click (CPC).
- If your goal is to increase conversions, your report should contain the cost per action (CPA) and the number of orders (or other conversion actions).
- If you want to increase return on marketing investment (ROMI), your report should contain ad spending, revenue, and average check size.
Main key performance metrics that suit the majority of companies and are mandatory for digital marketing and web analytics.
It’s preferable to include ad cost data in all reports on paid advertising channels, as without it, it’s difficult to decide which campaigns should be scaled and which shouldn’t.
Try to focus on the main part of a marketing report and don’t include too much data in reports, as this can make them unclear for the end user. Instead of one universal dashboard, create several separate dashboards**.**
For example, paid traffic specialists and marketing directors usually need reports with different metrics, for different periods, and with different levels of detail.
Parameters and metrics in a report should be interrelated and logically sequenced; otherwise, the reader can make erroneous conclusions. For example, if your CPA has changed, you should show conversion dynamics in a corresponding row.
To make a marketing report more visual and user-friendly, you can:
- Add context. Show market trends, data on competitors, the influence of seasonal demand, stock — everything that influences your advertising campaigns’ efficiency.
- Add textual comments to figures and charts in reports to explain how, when, and as a result of which actions an indicator was achieved.
- Think of data visualization. Charts and diagrams on dashboards make your story more comprehensible than figures in rows. Using reporting software can further enhance this by integrating various data sources, enabling custom report creation, and providing real-time analytics.
How Often Should Reports Be Generated Based on Decision Levels?
The period between reports should depend on who is going to use the reports and which decisions will be made based on them. Utilizing online marketing reporting software can significantly enhance digital marketing strategies by providing clear and tangible results. These decisions can be divided into four levels:
- Vision decisions are made by the board of directors, CEO, and marketing director. They’re responsible for brand investments and distributing the budget between online and offline channels. Usually, decisions on these matters are made annually or bi-annually based on market and consultant research.
- Strategic decisions are made by marketing and e-commerce directors, usually monthly. These directors are responsible for distributing the budget across channels and defining top-level KPIs. At this level, it’s important to understand the mutual influence of channels and make strategic decisions on how to develop each channel.
- Tactical decisions are usually made once a week by paid traffic managers. Traffic managers are responsible for distributing the budget among campaigns and advertising groups, and their decisions are aimed at clarifying KPIs and campaign goals. At this level, the budget for each channel has already been allocated, so the task is to decide which campaigns you should spend it on, monitor the results, and quickly disable ineffective campaigns.
- Execution decisions occur in near real time — for example, the decision to evaluate the contribution of an ad or keyword. Most often, such decisions are made within advertising services (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) by an advertising specialist.
Marketing report templates and examples of daily, weekly, and monthly reports.
Why Automation Is Required in Reporting
If you still build advertising reports manually — for example, in Google Sheets, Excel, or Google Analytics 4 — instead of using digital marketing reporting software, you risk not only your time but also your data quality.
Low-quality data is the primary reason for erroneous decisions:
- In Google Analytics 4, 10% to 20% of conversions are lost, and data is aggregated in the API and sampled in reports.
- Combining data in Google Sheets or in a standard database leads to regular system failures and subtle errors.
- Data in advertising services is stored in different formats and changes retrospectively, leading to discrepancies in reports.
- As a result, businesses lose time and money.
Since the quality of any report depends on the quality of the data it’s built on, we recommend using a specialized tool such as OWOX BI to collect and combine data for automating reporting. With OWOX BI, you can collect marketing data for reports of any complexity in secure Google BigQuery cloud storage without the help of analysts and developers.
Benefits of Using a Marketing Reporting Tool
Marketing reporting tools offer numerous benefits to businesses and marketing agencies. By utilizing a marketing reporting tool, organizations can streamline their reporting process, saving time and resources.
These tools provide a centralized platform for data collection, analysis, and visualization, enabling marketers to make data-driven decisions and optimize their marketing strategies.
Some of the key benefits of using a marketing reporting tool include:
- Improved Data Accuracy and Reduced Manual Errors: Automated data collection minimizes the risk of human error, ensuring that your marketing reports are accurate and reliable.
- Enhanced Data Visualization and Reporting Capabilities: These tools offer advanced visualization options, making it easier to interpret complex data and present it in a user-friendly format.
- Increased Efficiency and Productivity: By automating the reporting process, marketing teams can focus on strategy and analysis rather than manual data entry and report generation.
- Better Decision-Making with Real-Time Data and Insights: Access to up-to-date information allows marketers to make informed decisions quickly, adapting their strategies to current market conditions.
- Enhanced Collaboration and Communication: Marketing reporting tools often include features that facilitate collaboration, enabling team members and stakeholders to share insights and work together more effectively.
- Scalability and Flexibility: These tools can grow with your business, adapting to changing needs and integrating with new marketing channels and data sources as required.
By leveraging the capabilities of a marketing reporting tool, marketing agencies, and businesses can enhance their reporting processes, leading to more effective and efficient marketing strategies.
Key Features of a Marketing Reporting Tool
A marketing reporting tool typically includes a range of features that enable marketers to collect, analyze, and visualize data from various marketing channels and sources. Some of the key features of a marketing reporting tool include:
- Data Integration and Connectivity: The ability to connect to multiple marketing channels and data sources is crucial. This ensures that all relevant data is collected and analyzed in one place, providing a comprehensive view of your marketing efforts.
- Automated Data Collection and Reporting: Automation reduces the time and effort required to gather data and generate reports, allowing marketers to focus on analysis and strategy.
- Customizable Dashboards and Reporting Templates: Customization options enable marketers to create dashboards and reports that meet their specific needs, highlighting the most important metrics and insights.
- Real-Time Data Visualization and Analytics: Real-time data allows for immediate insights and quick decision-making, helping marketers stay agile and responsive to market changes.
- Drill-Down Capabilities: The ability to drill down into data for in-depth analysis is essential for understanding the underlying factors driving performance and identifying areas for improvement.
- Collaboration and Sharing Features: These features facilitate teamwork and communication, allowing team members and stakeholders to access and share insights easily.
- Scalability and Flexibility: A good marketing reporting tool can scale with your business, adapting to new marketing channels and data sources as your needs evolve.
- Integration with Other Marketing Tools and Platforms: Seamless integration with other tools and platforms ensures a smooth workflow and enhances the overall efficiency of your marketing operations.
These features make marketing reporting tools indispensable for modern marketers, providing the functionality needed to manage and optimize complex marketing campaigns effectively.
Choosing the Right Marketing Reporting Tool
Choosing the right marketing reporting tool can be a daunting task, with numerous options available in the market. To select the best tool for your business, consider the following factors:
- Data Sources and Integration: Ensure the tool can connect to your existing marketing channels and data sources. This is crucial for comprehensive data collection and analysis.
- Customization and Flexibility: Choose a tool that offers customizable dashboards and reporting templates to meet your specific needs. Flexibility in customization allows you to focus on the metrics that matter most to your business.
- Scalability: Select a tool that can adapt to your growing business needs. As your marketing efforts expand, the tool should be able to handle increased data volume and complexity.
- User Interface and Experience: Opt for a tool with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. A well-designed UI can significantly enhance the user experience, making it easier for your team to navigate and utilize the tool effectively.
- Collaboration and Sharing: Consider a tool that enables seamless collaboration and sharing among team members and stakeholders. Features that support teamwork can improve communication and ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Pricing and Cost: Evaluate the tool’s pricing model and ensure it fits within your budget. Consider both the initial cost and any ongoing fees to determine the total cost of ownership.
- Customer Support: Look for a tool with reliable customer support and resources. Good support can help you resolve issues quickly and make the most of the tool’s features.
By considering these factors, you can choose a marketing reporting tool that meets your business needs and helps you achieve your marketing goals.
Top 10 Marketing Reporting Software to Use for Advertising Reporting
In today’s data-driven marketing landscape, the best marketing reporting tools are indispensable for tracking and analyzing campaign performance.
These marketing reporting tools are popularly used by advertising agencies not only to streamline data aggregation but also to enhance the interpretation and visualization of complex datasets, enabling marketers to make informed decisions swiftly.
We’ve prepared a list of ten tools you can use to automate and simplify your advertising reporting. Find out how they work, what they don’t cover, and what businesses they suit.
1. Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 is one of the most popular marketing reporting software tools for digital ad reporting. It collects data from users’ HTTP requests, data on browsers/operating systems, and cookies using a Google Analytics Tracking Code.
The collected data then goes to Google Analytics 4 servers as a list of parameters, and Google Analytics 4 analyzes these parameters and builds reports. You can create advertising reports** in Google Analytics 4 using data from your Google Ads account.**
However, Google Analytics 4 doesn’t account for data from your CRM and non-Google services unless you import it manually, and it only processes data within 24 to 48 hours.
The free version of Google Analytics is suitable for small and mid-sized businesses.
2. OWOX BI
OWOX BI automatically collects your data from various online and offline sources in one location (for example, Google Analytics or Google BigQuery). After you’ve collected data, you can easily build reports in OWOX BI Smart Data or import your collected data to Looker Studio or another reporting tool.
To build advertising reports with OWOX BI Smart Data, you don’t have to know SQL — you can just select the metrics and parameters you want to see in your report and ask questions in natural language.
With OWOX BI, you can use the following data types from Google BigQuery to build your advertising reports:
- Data on user behavior (from your website, Google Analytics, or AppsFlyer)
- Data on ad costs (from your advertising accounts)
- Data on revenue (from your CRM)
- Data on email campaigns
- Data from social media platforms
Based on this data, you can create reports from templates or build your own reports with custom metrics using a simple report builder. OWOX BI collects any amount of data in the same structure used by Google Analytics and processes it in real time.
3. Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio)
Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio, is a premier free marketing tool for creating detailed reports. This platform allows users to set up connectors that fetch and analyze data, customize interactive dashboards using drag-and-drop operations, and craft visualizations in Explorer, an area designed for deep data exploration.
For building advertising reports, users can utilize templates available in the marketing dashboard template gallery of Looker Studio.
However, it's important to note that Looker Studio has limitations regarding the amount of data it can handle, the number of visual elements per page, and lacks official support from Google. The performance of Looker Studio may decrease with more than two data sources connected.
To manage large datasets more effectively, consolidating your marketing and sales data into a single dataset in Google BigQuery and then connecting it to Looker Studio as a singular data source can be beneficial.
This integration can be facilitated using tools like OWOX BI Pipelines to streamline the data collection process into Google BigQuery.
4. StitchData
StitchData is an ETL service that you can connect to more than 130 data sources, including to databases such as MySQL and MongoDB and SaaS tools such as Salesforce and Zendesk. Stitch then replicates all selected data to a data warehouse.
The final step of each Stitch replication job is called Loading, when StitchData loads extracted data into your destination in the form of a report.
You also can build advertising reports based on inventory, sales, and purchasing data by integrating with analysis tools such as Google Data Studio, Tableau, and Power BI.
However, StitchData doesn’t support SQL Server and Azure and provides a limited number of options for data extraction, warehousing, and loading.
StitchData is suitable for businesses of any size, up to enterprises.
5. Xplenty
Xplenty is a cloud-based ETL service that allows you to process data via reports and visualizations like charts and graphs. Xplenty automates data flows across a wide range of sources and destinations and cleans, normalizes, and transforms your data.
You can use it to connect to more than 100 data stores and SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Zendesk, and HubSpot and create advertising reports based on data you’ve connected.
Still, you should consider that Xplenty is a rather complex tool to learn.
Xplenty is suitable for large businesses and IT departments.
6. Klipfolio
Klipfolio is an excellent choice for an advertising tool focused on reporting because of its robust data visualization capabilities and user-friendly features. It offers a variety of visualization tools, including diverse chart types, bullet charts, and scatter plots, which are crucial for presenting complex advertising data in an understandable and impactful way.
This makes it easier for marketing teams to track campaign performance, analyze trends, and make data-driven decisions effectively.
Moreover, Klipfolio's built-in templates streamline the reporting process, allowing users to quickly create reports tailored to specific advertising goals. Its accessibility for users at all skill levels enhances its utility in a dynamic marketing environment, ensuring that both novice and expert analysts can derive meaningful insights from their advertising data.
This combination of ease of use and powerful functionality makes Klipfolio a top choice for businesses looking to enhance their advertising reporting and overall data management.
7. Tableau
Tableau is increasingly recognized as a powerful advertising tool, primarily due to its exceptional data visualization capabilities. It enables marketers to transform raw data into easily understandable visual reports, facilitating quick and informed decision-making.
With Tableau, users can sift through complex advertising data to pinpoint trends, patterns, and deviations, which are crucial for crafting effective marketing strategies. This feature is particularly valuable in dynamically adjusting campaigns based on real-time feedback and market conditions.
Moreover, Tableau supports extensive data integration from multiple sources, comprehensively analyzing advertising campaigns across different platforms and media. It provides real-time updates through dynamic dashboards, offering ongoing insights into the effectiveness of advertising efforts.
This continuous flow of information is essential for advertisers seeking to optimize their reach and impact, ensuring they adapt swiftly to consumer behavior and market dynamics changes.
By leveraging these insights, businesses can enhance their advertising efficiency, drive better outcomes, and maintain a competitive edge in their respective industries.
8. Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is a sophisticated marketing reporting tool designed for real-time analytics across web and mobile platforms. It offers powerful segmentation and real-time visualization capabilities to help marketers understand consumer behavior in depth.
Adobe Analytics integrates well with other Adobe Experience Cloud products, enhancing its utility for comprehensive digital marketing campaigns.
The platform excels at tracking customer journeys, providing insights into how users interact with different touchpoints. It also enables predictive analytics, which can forecast future trends and customer actions, helping marketers to adjust their strategies to maximize engagement and conversion rates proactively.
9. Sisense
Sisense is a business intelligence tool that excels at handling complex data from various sources to provide actionable insights with an easy-to-use interface. It's mainly known for its robust data integration capabilities and advanced analytics, which enable users to create interactive dashboards and reports that simplify complex information.
In advertising, Sisense helps marketers track and analyze campaign performance, user engagement, and ROI across multiple channels. Its ability to blend data from disparate sources into a cohesive analysis platform makes it ideal for organizations that operate in various advertising environments and need to consolidate their data for comprehensive reporting.
10. Salesforce
Salesforce offers a robust suite of marketing reporting tools within its cloud platform, emphasizing customer relationship management and integration. Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows marketers to create and manage marketing campaigns that are deeply integrated with Salesforce's CRM data, providing a 360-degree view of the customer.
The platform supports a variety of advertising channels, including email, social media, and mobile, with advanced analytics to track the performance and effectiveness of each campaign. Salesforce's tools are designed to help marketers personalize customer interactions and optimize their campaigns based on detailed insights into customer behavior and preferences.
Conclusion
You shouldn’t waste lots of your time manually preparing reports. Automate and simplify your ad reporting using specialized tools. Whether you’re a PPC professional who’d like to increase your efficiency or a CMO fearful of draining your ad budget, try one of these tools to ensure your campaigns are effective and consistently successful.
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