Marketing Report Guide: How to Create One and What to Include

Sean Divinagracia Last updated on: January 30, 2025

Every marketing team should clearly understand whether its efforts are yielding results. However, many marketing departments struggle to define their key performance indicators (KPIs) or establish effective analytics tracking, which can make their marketing reports less useful. Today, it’s essential for marketing teams to know how their efforts translate into revenue.

A professional and efficient marketing report gives you the power to make the right decisions for your business, driving the best results. This will enable you to lead your company toward success by identifying goals and finding growth opportunities within your data. A well-structured marketing report is essential for tracking valuable metrics that inform your strategies, enabling you to achieve the highest possible return on investment (ROI).

If you’re ready to measure your marketing efforts effectively, you’re in the right place! This guide will provide you with everything you need to know about marketing reporting, including which metrics to include and how to craft the ideal report for your business.

What is a marketing report?

A marketing report is a collection of data about your marketing strategies and campaigns that shows the results of your efforts. Depending on your strategies and goals now, your report might contain multiple metrics and data points that enable you to understand whether your campaign was successful. Marketing reports help you draw meaningful conclusions that can inform your marketing strategy.

Why is a marketing report important?

So why is marketing reporting necessary for a company? Here are some key reasons why marketing reports are essential to make informed business decisions:

• Easy data access: Marketing reports provide an easy way to access crucial data on your KPIs across all critical channels, from social media and email marketing to SEO and paid ads.
• Tracking the customer journey: Marketing reports provide high-quality data on customer behavior across different channels, including which devices they use and when they make purchases, so that you can tailor your data-driven approach.
• Data-driven decision-making: Marketing reports enable you to make decisions based on data analytics and not just intuition. This ensures that your marketing efforts are supported by measurable insights. 
• Alignment of marketing and sales goals: Effective communication between marketing and sales teams is achieved with marketing reporting that helps identify issues and improve strategies, keeping both teams aligned.
• Demonstrating value: Marketing reports prove the value of your marketing efforts by showing the effectiveness of your campaigns, such as lead generation, conversion rates, and revenue contributions.

Essential components to include in your marketing report

While each type of report will require unique sections, some elements are commonly included to make your marketing data as useful as possible. A well-organized marketing report typically includes the following key sections.

Overview of marketing strategy

Start with a brief summary of the overarching marketing strategy. This section should outline the goals, objectives, and context in which the assessed initiatives occur. Briefly describe the campaign and its activities while emphasizing key business aims such as brand awareness, lead generation, sales growth, and relevant KPIs.

Campaign performance

Break down individual marketing campaigns with specifics. In this section, you should list detailed metrics for each medium, such as Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This lets you know which worked the most efficiently for you.

Website engagement metrics

Include visitor data on how they interact with your website, which is very important for understanding online performance. Use insights from Google Analytics and other tools to illustrate user behavior and site effectiveness. Highlight opportunities for improvement, such as decreasing load times and improving the user experience on critical pages.

SEO and content analytics

Focus on organic search performance, including keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and pages driving the most traffic. This section helps assess the effectiveness of your content strategy and pinpoint areas where adjustments may be needed.

Social media performance

Social media marketing strategies are becoming a popular marketing channel for all types of businesses, covering broad markets, niche groups of audiences, consumers, and business clients.

An effectiveness review of social media marketing performance should break down performance metrics by platform, including engagement rates, reach, and conversions, to gain a comprehensive view of how social media contributes to the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Market research

This section combines performance data with market research for additional context. Analyze the performance of your competition in similar campaigns and industries to identify emerging market opportunities and provide updates on target demographics and consumer behaviors. This data is essential for improving your marketing strategies moving forward.

Different types of marketing reports

Each company has certain reports that are very specific to its business. This section will highlight the five types most commonly used across various sectors and industries.

1. General marketing reports

The most important aspect of a general marketing report is that it has to be clear and concise and indicate an overview of all marketing activities combined. You need to provide the stakeholders with a snapshot of your activities to keep them up to date on all your ongoing marketing projects without drawing attention to too much analysis.

One significant inclusion in a general marketing report is digital marketing ROI. This is an overview of revenue based on the marketing investment and helps to identify non-productive strategies and forecasts future marketing activities and budgets.

2. Analytical marketing reports

Analytical marketing reports can provide more insight into your data. This report goes further than describing how your strategies are performing. It reveals what is working or where you can improve your strategies. You can explore data trends in detail or conduct comparative analyses over different periods. Remember to include actionable recommendations based on your findings to guide future efforts.

3. Operational marketing reports

Daily operational reports focus on the day-to-day functions of your marketing activities. They typically include breakdowns of tasks and operational efficiency metrics, such as timelines and resource allocation. These reports are used to monitor the progress of running campaigns to ensure alignment with project goals and effective management of the team’s performance and workload.

4. Product reports

Product reports evaluate the performance and reception of individual projects and services. They assess product launches, providing insights into customer behavior and preferences. Most data may come from the sales department, but essential digital marketing report metrics must be included. This report is a vital resource for the marketing team in determining the best-performing products in the digital space.

5. Industry reports

Unlike earlier reports focusing on a business’s internal processes, industry reports provide a broad view of benchmarks and trends within your sector. These reports give insights into competitors and reveal gaps in the market or potential growth opportunities. They help position your business within the larger industry landscape, allowing you to strategize effectively for future success.

Need a user-friendly CRM to boost sales and team efficiency?

Take our guided tour to explore Nutshell’s incredible features!

EXPLORE NUTSHELL’S FEATURES

Easy steps to create your marketing report

Are you ready to get started with marketing reporting? Now that you understand marketing reports, it’s time to start creating your own! Here’s how to build your marketing report in a few steps.

1. Think about your goals and objectives

Ask yourself, what are you trying to accomplish with this report? Marketing reports are an excellent way to help you track your progress as you work toward achieving your business goals. But first, you’ll have to identify the goals and objectives that are most important for your business.

One way to maximize the value of a marketing report is to consider your business’s goals and objectives, whether you want to increase website traffic or raise awareness on social media.

2. Reflect on your current marketing strategies

Once you know your goals, you can consider marketing strategies you want to use for your business. These determine which campaigns you’ll track in your report.

Investing in an SEO or PPC campaign is a great idea to attract more visitors to your site. You can also start a social media marketing campaign to increase overall brand awareness in social networks.

3. Choose a reporting frequency

The next step in creating your marketing report is to choose how frequently you want to prepare it. Regularly monitoring your campaign performance is essential to ensure they’re driving the best results for your business.

You can opt to have reports monthly or quarterly, which will help keep you and your team updated on how well your marketing strategies are working.

4. Choose what metrics you want to measure

Perhaps the most important part of your marketing report is selecting which data and metrics to measure. These metrics will help you determine the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and activities. It’s essential that you choose measurable, trackable, and relevant KPIs.

For instance, if you want to increase your web traffic, you should track your traffic sources to understand which strategies drive the most visitors to your website.

Here are a few examples of key digital marketing metrics you can keep track of in your report:

• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Click-through rate
• Web traffic sources
• Lead sources
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• And more

Additionally, you can track essential audience behavior data on your website for your report. For example, you can track the time users spend on your web pages and their demographics, such as age and location.

5. Compile your report and interpret your findings

Once you’ve implemented your marketing strategies, selected your reporting frequency, and picked the metrics you want to measure, it’s time to compile your digital marketing report.

Make sure to also incorporate critical metrics for each of your strategies so you can easily measure the performance of your campaigns and your progress toward your business goals. And once you’ve your report prepared, it’s essential to analyze your marketing results.

Level up marketing reporting with Nutshell

Put your marketing reporting on autopilot with a world-class CRM solution packed with all the sales, marketing, and reporting tools you’ll need. 

With advanced reporting software right inside your CRM system, you can leverage lead, contact, sales, and marketing data for deeper insights into your activities, performance, and customers.

Let Nutshell automatically generate custom reports for you, analyzing and presenting a broad spectrum of metrics relevant to your business goals. Easily format your reports with eye-catching charts and graphs for better data visualization and sharing.

Through powerful automation and integration features, you can generate the reports you need and free up time to focus on tasks that have a more immediate impact on business growth.

Not a Nutshell user yet? Give our award-winning CRM a try today through our 14-day free trial!

Let’s Talk

Have a question? Need a volume discount? Send us a message or book a meeting with a Sales rep to start the conversation.

Contact Sales

BACK TO TOP