How to create an effective marketing report: goals, KPIs, data & dashboard

Whether you're a small business or a big agency, you will always need someone to monitor your data and the results of your marketing actions.

Keeping a close eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to gain insights into customer behavior, optimize your campaigns, and make informed decisions that drive growth and success.

This guide will walk you through the steps to develop a compelling marketing report that delivers actionable insights and keeps stakeholders, clients, or your team informed.

What is Marketing reporting?

A marketing report is a critical element of any effective marketing strategy. It involves collecting, analyzing, and presenting data related to marketing activities.

There are two main reasons why you need a marketing report:

• Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): These are the numbers that measure whether you're meeting your goals or need to change something.
• Keeping Everyone Informed: Regular reports help your team, boss, or clients stay updated on what's happening in marketing and how well it's performing.

You can create marketing reports at different times depending on your needs:

• Daily Reports: Quickly check if everything is going smoothly or if immediate action is needed.
• Weekly or Monthly Reports: These reports allow you to see patterns over a longer period and better understand overall performance.

One of the things we are doing at Catchr is having a big Looker Studio dashboard that prints our principal KPIs so we can see if everything is going great every day.

How to create a marketing report?

‍

To create an actionable marketing report, we recommend starting with the simple but powerful Who, Why, What framework:

• Who: Identify who will be using the report. Is it your CMO, the digital marketing team, or external stakeholders? Tailor your report specifically for their needs and understanding.
• Why: Define clearly why you're creating the report. What business decisions or marketing actions depend on it? For example, you may want to know if your last Facebook Ads campaign was successful.
• What: Determine the exact data points you need to inform those decisions. For an e-commerce business, it could be the number of sales or, for a SaaS, the MRR.

Starting with clear goals ensures that you won't waste time reporting irrelevant numbers or chasing data that will not impact your marketing decisions. This approach ensures resources directly support business goals—a point reinforced by Nielsen's latest study, which reveals marketers struggle with monthly reporting consistency across channels.

So, let's focus on each step now.

1. Who needs your marketing report?

Your marketing report is valuable for anyone who needs clear insights to make informed business decisions. At each level of your company, a person could (and should) have a report to know what actions were taken and how to debrief them.

Furthermore, a marketing report could help you rapidly examine a problem in your campaign.

For example, for a marketing agency that makes PPC or SEM campaigns, many levels of people could be involved :

• Account Managers who need timely data to optimize campaigns, allocate budgets effectively, and improve marketing performance.
• Marketing Managers and Directors who require clear insights to set strategy, measure progress, and adjust tactics for the client.
• The client wants to see what they pay for and the result of their campaign.

Another example could be an E-commerce business :

• Digital Marketing Managers: They use the report to evaluate the effectiveness of online campaigns, optimize ad spending, and increase return on investment.
• Directors and Executive: Reports offer high-level insights into revenue performance, customer acquisition costs, and conversion rates to guide strategic business decisions.
• Product Managers: Marketing reports inform them about customer behavior, best-performing products, and promotional effectiveness, helping them manage product inventories and promotions more effectively.
• Sales and Merchandising Teams: Detailed data about product performance and customer segments helps these teams tailor promotions, pricing strategies, and product offerings.
• Customer Experience Teams use insights from your reports—such as customer satisfaction, cart abandonment rates, and customer journeys—to enhance the online shopping experience.

Once you have defined who your marketing dashboard is for, you need to focus on "why they need it."

2. What is the purpose of your marketing report ?

Once you have defined who your report is, you need to determine the primary goal of the report you are building.

Some examples could include :

• Know if the new marketing campaign is successful: Determine whether a specific initiative (like your recent Facebook Ads campaign) met its objectives, justified investment, or should inform future ad spend decisions.
• Distribute your marketing budget: This will help management decide where to invest additional budget or cut back based on performance data. Knowing which product performs best on an e-commerce website could be very useful.
• Planning and Optimization: To provide insights for strategic shifts in marketing activities (channels, targeting, messaging, etc.) based on past performance.
• Alerting: When something goes wrong for whatever reason.

Now that you have the Who and the Why, we must dive into the What. This could be a dark place because of the complexity of KPIs and their respective silos.

3. What's inside your marketing report?

Each business has its own KPI to monitor in near real-time. If you do not have one, you should always focus on it and try to answer the question, "What are the main goals of my business ?"

These KPIs are the cornerstone of your marketing report, providing a clear reflection of your business objectives and precisely tracking your progress toward achieving them.

For an e-commerce business, it could be the number of sales and the total turnover. For a SaaS business, it could be the number of subscribers.

Each KPI is driven by its own set of influencing metrics that affect its performance.

For example, your website's loading time could have a big impact on your sales, so monitoring it could be a really good KPI to track.

At Catchr, we always apply the rules of three. Each department monitors three KPIs that could have three KPI that have an impact on it, etc…

For example, our marketing department has three KPIs:

• Visitor: The number of visitors.
• Signup: The number of signups.
• Leads: The number of leads.

For the Visitor's KPI, we have three other KPIs to watch :

• SEO: The number of visitors from SEO
• SEA: The number of visitors from SEA
• Referral: The number of visitors from Referal

And for SEO :

• Impressions: The number of impressions from the Google Search Console.
• CTR: The CTR from the Search console.
• Clicks: The clicks from the Search console.
  Find more SEO kpi.
  

With this method, we are not bloated by the KPI, and each team/person is focused on and responsible for their KPI.

‍

Some commons KPI used internally by our teams are :

Marketing KPI:

• Visitors: Total number of website visitors.
• Signups: Total number of new account creations.
• Leads: Total number of qualified leads generated.

Social Media KPIs:

• Engagement Rate: The average interaction (likes, shares, comments) per social media post.
• Follower Growth: Increase in the number of followers over a specific period.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Percentage of users clicking links within posts.

Email Marketing KPIs:

• Open Rate: Percentage of emails opened relative to emails sent.
• Click Rate: Percentage of recipients clicking links within emails.
• Unsubscribe Rate: Percentage of users opting out from email communications.

Website Traffic KPIs:

• Total Visitors: Overall number of visitors accessing the website.
• Bounce Rate: Percentage of visitors leaving after viewing only one page.
• Average Session Duration: Average time spent by visitors on the website.

You can find more specific marketing KPI by platform in our blog section : 

• Facebook Ads
• Instragram
• Shopify

Now that you have all the information you need, it's time to build the marketing report.

4. How do you create a marketing dashboard?

One of the most challenging tasks in creating your marketing report is to get all the data you need in the same place.

How to extract your marketing data 

This is precisely what Catchr is built for. Without tools like Catchr, extracting, copying/pasting, and formatting your data will take a lot of time. These repetitive actions are prone to errors, and time-consuming, and prevent your team from making quick, data-driven decisions based on fresh and accurate insights.

But with Catchr, you always prioritize real-time data updates by automating the extraction and synchronization of your data.

Catchr is compatible with a lot of different data sources:

• PPC: Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.
• SEM: Facebook Ads, Snapchat Ads, TikTok Ads, etc.
• E-commerce: Shopify, Magento, Amazon Ads, etc.
• Mailing: ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, etc.
• Review website: Yelp, Booking, etc.
• SEO: Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc.

{{cta-catchr}}

Now that you've identified who your marketing report is for, why it's essential, and what it should contain, you need practical tools to bring everything together clearly and intuitively.

Tools to visualize your data

There are two kinds of tools that you can use to analyze, visualize and understand your data : Spreadsheet and Visualization Tools.

Spreadsheet Tools 

Spreadsheet tools are essential for organizing, analyzing, and visualizing your marketing data efficiently. They offer intuitive interfaces for data entry and analysis, making them suitable for both quick insights and in-depth analytics. Two of the most popular spreadsheet tools include Google Sheets and Excel, each tailored to different business needs and user skill levels.

Google Sheets

Ideal for smaller teams or startups, Google Sheets is a versatile and user-friendly spreadsheet tool. It's perfect for quickly organizing marketing data, performing fundamental analysis, and creating simple visualizations. Its real-time collaboration features make it easy for teams to edit and review data simultaneously.

Excel

Excel is a powerful tool widely used for marketing analysis. It's ideal for extensive data crunching, advanced formulas, pivot tables, and complex visualizations. Although it requires some expertise, Excel remains a reliable choice for businesses needing robust analytics capabilities.

Visualization Tools

Interactive dashboards deliver real-time tracking capabilities, offering key benefits for monitoring marketing performance. These tools simplify complex data through visual displays, helping teams spot trends faster.

Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio)

Looker Studio takes reporting to the next level by creating interactive, dynamic dashboards. It directly integrates with Google Analytics, Google Ads, and many other platforms, offering advanced visualizations, interactive charts, and automated data updates.

For practical examples, see our Google Looker Studio tutorial that breaks down dashboard creation for traffic analysis and sales pipelines.

Tableau

Tableau is one of the most intuitive business intelligence (BI) tools on the market, and it is known for its exceptional visualization capabilities. It effortlessly handles large datasets, transforming complex data into clear, actionable insights. It suits larger organizations needing powerful data visualization and dashboarding features.

Power BI

Microsoft's Power BI offers advanced reporting and dashboard creation with strong integration into the Microsoft ecosystem. It's an excellent tool for businesses already embedded in the Microsoft environment and looking for detailed insights and advanced analytics capabilities.

Marketing report examples

SEO report

This SEO Overview Looker Studio Template provides a comprehensive visualization of essential SEO metrics to effortlessly track your website's organic performance. 

You can analyze key indicators such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, impressions, clicks, and more, helping to streamline reporting and enhance decision-making. 

Meta Ads

This Meta Ads Looker Studio Template helps you to visualize key performance metrics like Spend, Impressions, Reach, and ROAS in one unified dashboard. 

Clearly track budget distribution and campaign objectives to understand what's driving success, making informed decisions simpler and faster. Ideal for marketing teams, agencies, and freelancers, this intuitive template reduces manual tasks, increases accuracy, and lets you dive deeper into your Meta Ads data instantly. 

Social media report

This Social Media Organic Overview Looker Studio Template enables you to effortlessly monitor and analyze your organic social media performance in one centralized dashboard. 

Quickly track key metrics such as engagement rates, audience growth, impressions, and top-performing content across multiple platforms. 

Emailing performance report

This ActiveCampaign Overview Looker Studio Template allows you to seamlessly monitor and analyze your email marketing campaigns within an intuitive, centralized dashboard. 

Easily track key email performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and subscriber engagement, enabling you to optimize your marketing efforts effectively.

Website performance report

This Google Analytics 4 Looker Studio Template offers an intuitive and powerful way to visualize and analyze your website's key performance metrics using GA4 data. 

With insightful dashboards featuring user engagement, traffic sources and detailed sessions information, this template empowers marketers to make informed, data-driven decisions easily.

Ads campaign report

‍

This Google Ads Overview Looker Studio Template simplifies your Google Ads performance tracking with a clear, easy-to-use dashboard. 

Quickly monitor essential campaign metrics such as impressions, clicks, CPC, conversion rates, and costs over time. Additionally, identify your top-performing campaigns at a glance to optimize spending and improve ROI.