Average cost per conversion and Return on ad spend

Marketing reporting is the process of measuring progress, showing value, and identifying actionable steps to improve marketing performance and meet your goals. While we all do it, many of us don’t fully understand what we should be reporting on and how to do it effectively — that’s why we created this guide. So if you want to develop systematic and effective marketing reporting practices, then this article has been crafted just for you.

The benefits of marketing reporting

Let’s take a moment to outline some benefits as to why we should build reporting into our day to day workflows. Firstly, while it might be completely obvious to us that marketing is worth the investment, there are other people in this world that don’t agree with this assessment. Marketing is an investment in growth but there are some people see marketing as a support function and consider it as a cost. This is where marketing reporting comes in.

More than that, however, marketing reports provide you with a benchmark for how things are working. Where are we succeeding? What needs to be tweaked and improved? Which channels are working and which are not? Where should we focus our efforts and our budgets? All of these questions can be answered with marketing reports and they will guide you on where to focus your time and effort in marketing. Without marketing reporting, your team is flying blind so it’s vital reports and reporting become a core part of your day to day marketing operations and workflows.

The basics of marketing reporting

So now we know why we should be creating marketing reports, the next question is, what constitutes a marketing report? Honestly, a report can look nearly any way – and what’s most important to you and your team might not be what’s important to another. That being said, a typical marketing report is broken up into a few main sections: