Marketing reports are a vital tool for determining whether your marketing expenditure is delivering value. They’re only useful, however, if you receive—and use—them regularly. What’s equally important, however, is that you are reviewing the right metrics to provide the information you need. Here are 8 critical marketing reports your marketing agency need to be building you each month.
Conversions
Tracking and monitoring conversions indicates the value your various marketing channels contribute to your overall strategic goals, according to HubSpot. Conversion reports should provide in-depth information on factors such as:
- Macro conversions, which are those supporting your overarching business goals such as submission of contact forms, scheduling a consultation or making a purchase.
- Micro conversions, which are steps towards the macro conversions including the length of time visitors spend on a page, how they interact with your social media and pay-per-click results.
- Cost per conversion, or the amount you spend to achieve those conversions. When this is compared with the value of the conversion it provides you with your return on investment (ROI).
- Leads generated per channel / offer, so you can identify which opportunities are the most successful.
This report provides detailed information on how website visitors interact with your content, and which of those interactions are the ones driving conversions.
Unique Visitors
It’s one thing to know how many visits or page impressions your site gets, but unique visitors are what you really want to know. Your marketing agency should provide you with a monthly report detailing how many individual users came to your site each day, week, month and year.
A unique visitor is counted once each day, but is also counted once for the purposes of weekly, monthly and annual reporting. This information gives you a sense of the size of your audience, according to Anthony Valela of Agility CMS. It enables you to compare the traffic to your website year over year, and determine whether you’re experiencing growth.
Bounce Rate
Your website’s “comings” may be important but so are the “goings,” and by tracking your bounce rate you can identify what’s not working. Analyzing a high bounce rate or one that increases over time can highlight whether you have pages that have low usability, don’t convert visitors easily or take too long to load. It can also help identify products and services that get a lower response. By reviewing patterns in your bounce rate you can pinpoint and adjust pages that aren’t working.
Keyword Performance
The success of your inbound marketing hinges partly on the accuracy of keyword research and usage, so keyword performance is a critical report. This is important not only for you to know which keywords are driving the majority of your traffic and leads, but to:
- Identify negative keywords and the results of using them
- Monitor your quality score on Google and ranking in search
- Know which keywords to use to optimize your AdWords campaigns
- Optimize landing pages to draw the most traffic.
Content Performance
The majority of content channels are unique, and it’s important to know how well your content is performing on each. With content becoming a “big ticket” expenditure item for marketers, you want to know just what it’s achieving.
Your agency should be able to provide a comprehensive content performance report that shows which pieces of content drove the most traffic and evaluates the results of each channel against a set of universal KPIs. That’s the only way you’ll know how your content is doing overall.
Landing Page Performance
Your landing pages have specific reasons for existence and specific roles to play. By tracking and interpreting monthly landing page reports you can identify how each offer is received by the market, how usable the page is, how long the average user spends on the page and how often he comes back to it. This will give you the information to conclude how well your offers are doing, and whether they need adjustment.
Summary of Work Completed
Do you sometimes wonder what your marketing agency is up to all day? You might be surprised to find out just how much work goes into making your marketing happen. The better your agency, the more effortless campaigns will appear—and that means better talent, more work and effort put into creating them. Agencies know their customers don’t always understand what they do, however, and comprehensive reporting is a critical aspect of the client relationship. Regular reporting gives the agency an opportunity to communicate with clients, and a summary of work provides the information you need. For any sizeable client, most agencies create feedback reports detailing what has taken place during the month.
Challenges, Wins & Recommendations
Your b2b marketing agency should provide you with marketing reports on the progress of your account, including challenges presented, wins achieved and recommendations for ongoing success. Your job is managing the business while theirs is to market it, so you’re entitled to feedback on how well it’s going and anything else you need.
