Marketing Reporting: not knowing how to interpret results can negatively impact your business

papers and laptops over the desk

Although we do a lot of reporting ourselves, we tend to forget that our customers don’t have the same know-how as we do, where certain KPIs and performance can go unnoticed – so we’ve created this article just for you!

What is a marketing report?

A marketing report is the process of measuring progress, showing values, and identifying potential actions to improve your marketing performance and meet your goals. The best marketing report is the one that speaks directly to its audience.

What to ask your digital marketing agency?

Identify and be specific on what's important

In the absence of guidance, we -or another digital marketing agency- will make a report with dozens of different metrics that you’ve probably never heard of or that don’t tell you anything.

In this step, it is important to have continuous and dynamic communication of your digital priorities. Usually, expenses, strategies, or new leads are the most important metrics of a digital campaign.

It is extremely easy for a person who does marketing for a living to show what worked the best in a campaign, burying what really matters, then turning a bad campaign into strange metrics and illusions of success.

Not only will the reports become easier to read, but you will also have a better alignment with your digital agency where you will force them to focus on the metrics that matter most to you.

Ask for comparisons!

A single metric alone will never say anything. You can always ask your agency to make comparisons with periods of time. It is always necessary to contextualize the numbers for these to make sense and to understand if the results are good, bad or if they actually don’t matter.

Remember that no two campaigns are alike, no two deals are alike – what may be “good” for a customer may not be good for you.

Marketing Metrics

Obviously, a marketing agency will put almost anything in a report – as the metrics are all intertwined with each other. However, as a customer, you will only be interested in just a few indicators such as conversions, their cost, or even the cost per click.

Usually, several metrics are used because these help the marketing specialist to get a sense of the next strategies he can draw. Now it’s up to the specialist to find a way to give more shine to what was agreed between client and agency in terms of their goals and objectives, and which metrics best demonstrate the return on investment (ROI). Typically, these statistics include the following:

  • Channel sources – which channels are performing best and generating the most clicks/leads
  • Conversions / Lead – a list of the volume of people who could become potential customers through actions on a website or an event
  • Revenue
  • Cost per acquisition/lead
  • Clicks
  • Purchase
  • Keywords
  • Search Ads
  • Bounce rate

These are typically the most common KPIs that might answer your questions about campaign performance.

Conversions: The Most Important Metric

As we mentioned in another article (Conversions, conversion rate, and e-commerce sales), conversions are useful to check the effectiveness of ads together with consumers.

By tracking conversions, it is possible to:

  • See which keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns perform best to drive conversions.
  • Understand the return on investment (ROI), allowing decision-making to be better aligned with advertising budgets for upcoming campaigns.
  • Use different types of Smart Bidding strategies that helped to automatically optimize campaigns according to conversion goals.
  • Get a clear picture of where your customers are going before they make a conversion. (Learn how to master the 5 stages of the Customer Journey in this article)

Zero conversions? Something is happening!​

If the campaign shows zero results, you are going through one of these problems -or both-:

  • The campaign is being a true FLOP
  • Whoever did the campaign did not add a conversion metric

It is true that not all campaigns are created with conversions as their main goal, but this is the metric that is most used to sell or register new forms (leads).

If you can't measure, you can't manage

This is where we will try to sell our “fish”. Amplifier brings all platforms together in one place, collecting data and carrying out optimizations automatically and autonomously, presenting the data in real-time. And when we say data, we’re talking about the KPIs that matter most – we don’t hide anything behind a thousand and one metrics of might and grandeur.

In addition to being able to enjoy Artificial Intelligence software, you also have a human team working with you to make your business grow in a sustainable and natural way.

Intuitive, easy-to-navigate dashboards and a modern design make Amplifier an essential tool for any business embarking on a digital marketing adventure. The cost is very affordable and training is included in the price! Are you curious? Contact us today and start selling more tomorrow!