11 Vital Metrics for Digital Marketing Reporting in Large Enterprises

Monthly marketing reports are crucial for any business's success. While it is typically a very tedious monthly task, reports serve as a source of actionable insights into performance and team alignment. It's vital information that you'll later use to optimize strategy to get higher ROI.

To cut time prepping the report and get straight to the insights, use this article as a hint on what to include in your marketing report each month.

For those who may not have time to read through the entire article, we've compiled a quick rundown of the must-have metrics for digital marketing reports in the table below. This concise summary will help you understand the key metrics and their significance in creating an effective marketing report.

Must-Have Metrics	Why You Need to Include Them
Traffic Metrics (Sessions, Bounce Rate, Referrals, etc.)	To monitor website traffic sources and user behavior, identify successful channels, and optimize the marketing strategy.
Conversion Metrics (Leads by Channel, Cost per Conversion, etc.)	To evaluate the effectiveness of marketing efforts in driving desired actions, such as sales or sign-ups, and maximize ROI.
SEO Overview (Keyword Rankings, Backlinks, etc.)	To track the performance of your search engine optimization efforts, improve search visibility, and drive organic traffic.
PPC Campaign Performance (Ad Spend, ROI, CTR, etc.)	To assess the efficiency of paid advertising campaigns, allocate budgets effectively, and optimize ads for better performance.
Social Media Metrics (Engagement, Traffic from Social Channels, etc.)	To measure the impact of social media marketing, engage audiences, and identify successful content and strategies.
Email Campaign Performance	To track the success of email marketing campaigns, improve open and click-through rates, and enhance customer engagement.
Top Landing Pages	To identify high-performing pages that drive traffic and conversions, and optimize website content for better results.
Organic vs. Paid Leads	To compare the effectiveness of organic and paid marketing channels and allocate resources efficiently.
Goals and Financial Projections	To set targets, monitor progress, make data-driven decisions, and estimate costs and returns for future marketing initiatives.

What is a digital marketing report?

Digital marketing reporting is all about collecting and examining performance data across all of your marketing activities and then turning that info into an easy-to-understand report. It's kind of like a progress report for your marketing campaigns.

Why is it important? Well, these reports help marketers make better decisions in the future. They show what's working and what's not so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly. Plus, they show the value of your marketing efforts, which is always a good thing.

In a nutshell, digital marketing reporting helps you learn from your past campaigns, improve your future strategies, and demonstrate the impact of marketing efforts on the company’s bottom line. It's like having a secret weapon for marketing success!

What to include in a marketing report?

A good digital marketing report should include a few key elements to help you track progress, make data-driven decisions, and showcase your achievements. Here's what you should consider including:

Goals

Start by outlining the objectives of your marketing campaigns. This helps you and your team stay focused and aligned on what you're trying to achieve. For example, you might set goals like increasing website traffic, boosting social media engagement, or improving conversion rates.

Key Performance Indicators

These are the specific metrics you'll use to measure the success of your campaigns in relation to your goals. Examples include click-through rates, cost per acquisition, or email open rates. Identifying the right KPIs helps you track progress and see where you need to make adjustments.

Well-structured Data

Present the data you've collected in a clear and concise manner using charts, graphs, or tables. This makes it easy for others to understand the impact of marketing efforts. For instance, you could use a line chart to show month-over-month growth in website traffic or a bar graph to compare engagement across different social media platforms.

The means of presenting your data depend on your business objectives and the type of data you’re tracking. You can find the most effective visualization tools and tips on using them in this article.

Insights and Recommendations

As well as the data itself, your report should include the insights you and trends you found inside your data. They demonstrate the marketing’s team ability strategic thinking and allow you to tweak your campaigns based on acquired insights. For example, if you notice that blog posts with videos get more engagement, you might recommend creating more video content in the future.

Progress Updates

Show how your marketing efforts have evolved over time and highlight any significant achievements or milestones. This helps demonstrate the value of your work and showcases continuous improvement. You could highlight a successful campaign that led to a significant increase in newsletter subscribers or a social media campaign that went viral.

By including these elements in your digital marketing report, you create a comprehensive overview of your marketing efforts, making it easier to assess progress, celebrate successes, and identify areas for improvement. The best digital marketing reports not only present data but also tell a story that inspires action and drives results.

Digital Marketing Reporting Complexities in Large Enterprises

While digital marketing reporting is essential, large organizations often face unique challenges in managing and consolidating their marketing data.

In its infancy, digital marketing reporting is relatively easy to handle and doesn’t require a lot of effort when it comes to managing data, creating dashboards, etc. However, with a growing number of platforms you run ads on, expansion to new markets, and new campaigns designed to achieve different business objectives, the reporting process might get quite complicated.

The sheer volume of data, the need to integrate data from multiple sources, and the complexities of custom reporting for various stakeholders can make the process daunting and resource-intensive. Let’s dive into the specific challenges large enterprises encounter and explore how an advanced marketing analytics platform can help tackle these issues effectively.

Need for scalability, or “I can’t navigate my marketing data with confidence”

As large enterprises expand their marketing efforts across various markets and regions, they often encounter scalability issues. These challenges can make marketers feel like they're drowning in data, struggling to maintain a consistent approach to analyzing their marketing metrics. Let's discuss some of the most common scalability challenges:

Main roadblocks to scalability in digital marketing reporting

Building custom dashboards for each market/region: Creating tailored dashboards for different markets or regions can be a daunting task, especially when attempting to maintain consistency in marketing metrics across the organization.

Combining data from different regions: Consolidating and harmonizing marketing data from multiple regions requires significant effort to ensure accurate and meaningful marketing performance insights. Having similar metrics from multiple regions requires a well-thought naming convention and storage architecture to ensure that your metrics belong to the right region.

Manually pulling data from numerous ad accounts: With ad accounts for each brand, sub-brand, and regional unit it becomes increasingly hard and time-consuming to build a holistic picture of your marketing performance .

Extracting data from multiple sources: Large organizations often use numerous marketing tools and platforms, making it challenging to aggregate and compare metrics across different sources.

Aggregating same metrics from different platforms: Large organizations often use numerous marketing tools and platforms, making it challenging to aggregate and compare metrics across different sources. Especially when platforms have different names or definitions for similar metrics (e.g., Views and Impressions).

Faced with these scalability challenges, marketers need a solution that allows them to efficiently manage their marketing data and derive meaningful insights from it. There are two main approaches to addressing these issues:

Solution 1: DIY Marketing Reporting Infrastructure

Creating a custom marketing reporting infrastructure involves duct-tape programming, as marketers often lack the expertise of data scientists or programmers. This approach requires using a variety of data tools (e.g., extraction, data governance, and normalization tools) and APIs to accelerate the delivery of data to the team's storage and dashboards.

Below you will find a cheat sheet of tools commonly used to create a basic digital marketing reporting infrastructure.

Digital marketing reporting infrastructure cheat sheet

Be cautious! While DIY solutions provide features tailored to your business objectives, they are extremely hard to build, especially for large companies. Consider your resources carefully, because the development of your own solution might take months or even years (depending on your engineering capacity). Besides, the API and dashboard maintenance also takes time. It’s a very common for some API connectors to fall off, leading to malfunction of your entire reporting system.

Solution 2: Marketing Analytics Platform

If you’re looking for resource-effective option that provides an all-round support while granting a similar level of customizability, a marketing analytics platform would be the best option.

The current market is full of platforms for different analytics needs marketing teams of different sizes. Let’s take a look at Improvado, a marketing analytics platform for enterprise-level companies.

Improvado is designed to fit the most sophisticated needs of large marketing teams. The platform works best for companies with ad budgets over $500k per year running campaigns across multiple markets, channels, and platforms.

With Improvado’s help, teams can get a comprehensive picture of marketing performance across 500+ marketing and sales platforms in just a few clicks. The platform connects to all data sources to extract marketing metrics and transform them into analysis-ready insights.

Then, Improvado streamlines your data into pre-built dashboard templates designed for different use cases. From e-commerce analytics to a marketing cockpit, showing you the total impact of your cross-channel efforts, Improvado got everything data-driven teams might need.

Cross-channel marketing report — A marketing analytics cockpit inside of Improvado’s UI

What used to take months to achieve is now readily available with Improvado. Simply connect your desired data sources, choose the templates you need, and track changes in your marketing performance in real time.

Improvado’s clients also get 24/7 support and a dedicated customer success manager. Additionally, if your team doesn’t have the required talents or resources, you can benefit from Improvado’s Professional Services package. Improvado’s team of marketing analysts and data experts can create custom dashboards, create advanced queries for your marketing data, and fulfill any other request to get you closer to your business goals.

Three simple steps to automate your marketing reporting

Here's how you can save hundreds of manhours and get in-depth insights into your marketing efforts in three simple steps:

Step 1: Schedule a consultation with the Improvado expert to discuss your marketing data sources, analytics needs, and BI tools your team uses.

Step 2: Once you've gained access to Improvado, pick the marketing platforms your team uses out of Improvado's library of 500+ marketing and sales data sources. Our platform will extract all metrics you need in just a few moments.

Step 3: Choose one of Improvado's dashboard templates depending on your use case. The platform will automatically load data to a visualization tool. Now, you're all set to start analyzing trends and finding insights into your campaign performance.

And voila, you have a real-time dashboard with insights into marketing performance across platforms you use (just like the one below).

Improvado's web analytics and paid ads performance dashboard — Automated insights-rich dashboards for a variety of marketing use cases

The cross-functional collaboration gap

In large organizations, cross-functional collaboration is essential for marketing success. However, marketers often face challenges that hinder effective communication and alignment with other departments. There are three main roadblocks to cross-functional collaboration. Let’s take a look at them and see how a robust digital marketing reporting system can help overcome them.

Teaming up with other departments can be a bit tricky. Here’s why:

Lack of transparency into what happens to lead after it goes to sales: A common issue is the lack of visibility into the sales process after a lead is handed off to the sales team. This gap in communication leads to misalignment between marketing and sales, impacting overall marketing performance. Sometimes, marketing teams can’t determine whether the lead was qualified by sales, how did the sales presentation go, and whether the lead was a good fit for the company at all. A robust digital marketing reporting solution provides insights into the entire customer journey, from the first touch with the brand to conversion, enabling better collaboration with sales teams and informed decision-making.

Challenges preparing reports for internal stakeholders (e.g., PMMs and C-level): Creating tailored marketing reports for various internal clients is a daunting task due to a variety of metrics that different stakeholders are interested in. Marketers are often not sure whether their reports will be actionable for other teams, because different roles have different perspectives on the value generated by the marketing team. A digital marketing reporting solution with ready-made report templates helps you deliver the right information to the right people automatically.

Identifying revenue-generating channels: Finance, marketing, and sales teams should closely work together to understand which channels bring revenue. However, with the data scattered across different CRMs, spreadsheets, and other sources, getting a clear picture of revenue generation is almost impossible. A marketing analytics platform with marketing attribution capacities connects all dots between disparate business data to help you identify the strongest and weakest touchpoints across your funnel.

A marketing analytics platform bridges the communication gap between departments by centralizing data and providing real-time insights accessible to all relevant teams. This fosters a shared understanding of marketing performance and goals. With customizable dashboards and easy-to-understand visuals, teams can collaborate more effectively, aligning their strategies and ensuring a consistent approach to achieving business objectives.

Digital marketing reporting: attribution modeling

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The real-time data struggle in complex enterprise settings

Having access to real-time insights is crucial for optimization of your campaigns and smart budget management. However, large organizations often face significant challenges in obtaining up-to-date marketing data and maintaining visibility into their marketing efforts.

A tangled, often out-of-date enterprise data infrastructure places a lot of constraints on marketing analytics. Privacy regulations and data silos prevent marketing teams from having a real-time view into their marketing data. Eventually, it limits the team’s agility when dealing with budget-intensive or experimental campaigns that might need to be changed or stopped in an instant.

Besides, teams that update data manually spend numerous hours collecting data instead of analyzing it and implementing changes based on the derived insights. By the time they finish the report, the data gets outdated again.

So, what’s the solution?

Companies with a lot of marketing activities and large budgets should take marketing analytics seriously. A highly-competitive marketing field requires modern tools to enable your decision-making with real-time reports and reliable data.

A proper marketing analytics platform that complies with today’s data regulations can help you automate your marketing reporting in a secure and efficient manner. For example, Improvado complies with all of today’s critical data regulations (HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA) while collecting and visualizing your data with zero code and minimum time expenses.

Top 11 Metrics and Elements for your Digital Marketing Report

1. Summary Page

A summary page should be the first part of your monthly marketing report and should include a project overview and highlight the metrics that are the most important. The summary should be easy to read and concise. Use data visualisation tools to make it easier. This part of the report should give the client a general understanding of where marketing efforts stand for the month. Everything after the summary page should be more detail information of what has been highlighted in this section.

Digital marketing reporting: summary page — A summary page with essential metrics for paid ads

2. Current Marketing Strategy

Those reading your monthly marketing report may not be as well versed in your marketing strategy as you. This is where a section that explains your current marketing strategy can be incredibly helpful. This section of the report should answer a few questions, such as:

Who is the target audience?
What are the primary channels for marketing?
What opportunities for growth are you currently pursuing?
What is the current scope of the project?

You should make sure that the project scope is clear and reinforce confidence with this section that your marketing strategy is well-thought-out. If part of your marketing offerings is SEO, this area of the report is where you would provide a brief overview of SEO efforts. The marketing strategy section is also where you can discuss target audience, as well as on how customers are being reached.

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3. What You Have Done

This section is where you can provide some historical context while showcasing how brilliant your team has been during the month. Show comparisons of this month’s work against the last month, the past six months, or year.

Provide a short overview of what you have accomplished during the month in relation with your client’s overall marketing strategy. For example, did you launch a new campaign, work on website development, design new collateral? You can list tasks accomplished during the month.
Example:

Tasks completed this month:

Reviewed strategy and analytics
Complete site audit
Launched 7-day Facebook campaign around blog
Published four blog posts
Published daily content on social media channels
Gained 10 new backlinks.

More detailed information can be included later in the various metric sections. Any changes in the audience or market should also be discussed in this section, along with any relevant information about the competition. This section is important because it lays the groundwork for how well clients understand the rest of your marketing report.

4. SEO Overview

The SEO Overview section includes any information about the SEO services you provide to clients, such as keyword research, link building, or site optimization. In this section, you can explain how your client’s rankings have increased and elaborate on what has been done to achieve the results. The SEO section should include tables that display information like new backlinks or a site audit that shows the progress on the website.

Part of the SEO section should be dedicated to search rankings for various keywords. To keep things simple, consider choosing a short list of keywords that your clients ranks well for and any relevant keywords they should try to improve their ranking for.

5. Traffic Metrics

It’s crucial to understand where web traffic is coming from, as well as how it performs, in order to not waste any money or time on developing marketing efforts on unsuccessful channels. Are visitors coming from referrals, organic search, paid search, emails? Metrics to highlight in this section of the monthly marketing report include:

Top Landing Pages
Sessions
% New Users
Top Referrals
Bounce Rate
Pages/Session
Email Campaign Performance.

These traffic metrics can be used as a foundation for other sections in the report where you can dive deeper into channels and make any relevant recommendations. Use these metrics to improve your marketing strategy for the next month.

Traffic metrics for a digital marketing report — Improvado’s dashboard with basic traffic metrics

6. Conversion Metrics

Your clients will likely be most interested in any metrics that impact their bottom-line. The conversion metrics section should be the core of your marketing report and feature several charts displaying the important data your clients care most about.

Conversion Metrics from Google Analytics

These statistics and graphs should backup your progress and goals. Keep in mind, however, that the report should still be easy for your client to understand, so try not to overwhelm with information. Make it easy to read. Include reports on various conversion metrics, such as:

Organic vs. Paid Leads
Cost per Conversion for Paid Channels (Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc.)
Leads by Channel (Paid Search, Organic Search, Referral, Email, Social, etc.)

Compare these metrics from one month to another to determine where there is success and which areas need improvement.

7. PPC Campaigns

You should also include a section for PPC campaigns in the marketing report each month if you manage campaigns for clients. This section should include metrics related to paid channels, such as:

Ad Spend
Impressions
CTR (click-through rate)
ROI (return on ad spend)
Cost per Conversion.

Be sure to compare these metrics to each marketing channel. Recommendations can be made to clients based on these metrics, especially if your client has a limited budget.

Digital marketing reporting with a TikTok Ads dashboard — An example of a TikTok Ads dashboard built with Improvado

8. Social Overview

Social Media is an important component to any digital marketing strategy with its own KPIs that should be included in a monthly marketing report. Provide your clients with a performance overview for each of their social media channels, such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Be sure to focus particularly on engagement metrics to show more of a deeper look at the success of each channel. Include a web traffic report showing traffic from social channels to highlight how social media can generate new leads.

Social media reporting dashboard — LinkedIn organic growth analytics with Improvado’s dashboard

9. Blog Traffic and Leads

If you manage the content marketing strategy or a blog for a client, there should also be a section in your report about blog traffics and leads. This information should be documented every month to ensure the blog has optimal performance. Take a look at how visitors are finding the content you publish on the blog and analyze which marketing channels are the most successful and which could use some improvement. This can help optimize your content strategy by highlighting what type of content draws visitors.

10. Goals and Ideas

Setting goals and achieving them is what keeps brands and businesses growing, so you will want to include a goals and ideas section in your monthly report. Revisit goals you set each month to check on progress. It’s a good idea to highlight plans for future marketing campaigns. This provides a way to involve clients and offer them a chance to follow your progress and ask questions.

Digital marketing reporting: KPI dashboard — A marketing KPI dashboard built with Improvado’s data

11. Financial Projections

While this section of the report won’t ever be completely accurate, it should feature all information present in the marketing plan. Discuss any future expenses for promotions that you anticipate spending in the next month or so, along with the estimated ROI. The financial projections section should include the projected costs of achieving the goals you mentioned in the previous section of the marketing report.

Seamless marketing reporting on large volumes of data with Improvado

That was a lot of metrics to cover, right? Of course, digital marketing reporting isn't limited to the metrics we've discussed in this article; there's a lot more to track, and everything depends on your specific use case.

Marketing reporting can be a real hurdle. Especially in large organizations with a variety of internal stakeholders, complicated data infrastructures, and the rest of the intricacies. Large players should take analytics seriously due to the sheer number of campaigns being launched, significant marketing budgets, and other factors.

A large enterprise like yours could benefit from an automated marketing analytics platform. Improvado helps marketing teams handle their data and create state-of-the-art digital marketing reports. With its ability to aggregate data from 500+ marketing and sales platforms and provide reliable insights, Improvado empowers you to streamline reporting, enhance collaboration, and make data-driven decisions with ease. Stop manual reporting chaos and learn how automation can improve your marketing ROI today!

Turn tons of raw data into actionable marketing insights with Improvado.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the essential metrics to include in digital marketing reports?

Key metrics include traffic metrics (sessions, bounce rate, referrals), conversion metrics (leads by channel, cost per conversion), SEO overview (keyword rankings, backlinks), and PPC campaign performance (ad spend, ROI, CTR).

How often should I create digital marketing reports?

It's recommended to create digital marketing reports monthly to monitor performance, align your team, and make data-driven decisions for optimizing strategies.

What tools can I use to create digital marketing reports?

Popular tools for creating digital marketing reports include Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Tableau, and marketing platforms like HubSpot or Improvado.

How can I make my marketing report visually appealing and easy to understand?

Use data visualization tools, clear charts, graphs, and concise language to make your marketing report easy to read and digest for your clients or team.

How can I use digital marketing reports to improve my marketing strategy?

Use insights from your report to identify successful channels, campaigns, and content, as well as areas that need improvement. Set goals, review progress, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.

How should agencies report monthly metrics?

Agencies should provide a summary page, include essential metrics (traffic, conversion, SEO, and PPC), highlight achievements and progress, set and review goals, and offer recommendations for improvement in a clear, visually appealing, and easy-to-understand format.