To succeed in today’s digital marketing world, you have to have quality reporting and great analytics. Excellent reporting and analytics can tell you what is going right and what is going wrong in your marketing strategy. Knowing what you need reports on and analyzing your marketing data can be very beneficial to your strategy in many different ways. So, what type of reports and analytics are useful for your marketing efforts?

What Type of Reports and Analytics Are Useful in Marketing

Useful marketing reports and analytics can help you zero in on the things you need to improve on in your campaign and know what parts of it are succeeding. To determine what aspects of your marketing campaign may need tweaking, what reports and analytics should you look at?

For reports, you need to figure out what metrics you want a report on. These metrics vary depending on your company’s goals. For example, you will need a different report for SEO and PPC. Some of the most common metrics that are used in reporting include:

• Conversions
• Bounce Rate
• Cost Per Acquisition
• Revenue
• Clicks

These metrics are usually the first ones that are reported on in a marketing campaign. They are useful in telling how many people have converted, how long they were on a particular page, the cost for each of them, the number of clicks a page has, and the revenue generated. 

For analytics, the goal is to determine how to improve your marketing campaigns. It would help if you saw how they are performing as well as how effective they are. This is where marketing data comes into play. You need to be able to turn this data into useful information. Some of the main types of analytics marketers look out for are:

• Return on Investment
• Lead Generation
• Social Media
• Website

The data gained from these analytics will help you see what parts of your campaign need some more tweaking. 

Benefits of Reporting

Marketing reports provide many insights into your marketing efforts. With informative reports, you can show how your campaigns are reaching their goals, driving high conversions, generating high-quality leads, and bringing in revenue. This shows the high value that your marketing team brings to the company. Along with showing measurable results, there are other benefits of reporting.

• What’s Succeeding? Knowing what part of your marketing campaign has been succeeding lets you find out the “why.” You can use this information and apply it to your future campaigns to see if it works just as well.
• What Needs Improvement? Finding out what part of your campaign needs improvement will help you determine how to improve it. 
• What Should Be Prioritized? If you find out that you can generate more conversions in one part of your campaign versus the other, you can prioritize that part of your campaign to generate even more conversions!

How to Use Analytics to Your Advantage

Along with the benefits of reports, you can also use analytics to your advantage. You can use analytics to back up your marketing reports. Having actual numbers to back you up can make your claims more convincing. This can lead to more funding for any of your future marketing campaigns. With quantifiable analytics, you can have more specific answers rather than just saying, “Looks like our numbers are up!”

Another way to use analytics to your advantage is that it can help you predict what may happen. Predictive analytics can help you anticipate the future behavior of your customers. For example, if you begin to notice a trend of your customer count dropping from week to week, you can likely determine that this will continue in the long term. Using this newfound information, you can try to find a solution to help you retain those customers. 

Analytics can help you compare your marketing data. You can compare your campaigns against one another to see which one fared better. You can also see if they reached the goals you had set out for them. Which one had the better ROI? Did they reach the goals that you had set in the beginning? You can take this data and use it to determine where you want to go from there, depending on your goals, of course!

One more advantage of using analytics is that it can help your businesses stay on track to reach goals. Your marketing campaign has many goals in it. Whether it is generating leads or driving more conversions on your website, you can analyze your data to see if you are still on track to reach those goals. Analytics makes your progress more measurable and can help you find out what kind of problems prevent you from reaching your goals.

Conclusion

Having quality reporting and analytics can benefit your marketing efforts by providing valuable insight into how they’re performing and what needs to be improved to make it better. Without them, you will not be able to answer specific questions regarding your campaign. Reports and analytics can give you these answers and many more.

If you need help in improving your marketing strategy, check out how we can help here! We are more than happy to help you with your marketing efforts.