A specific number might come to mind—a few hours or a few days—but a more general answer for most marketers is “too long.”
At Databox, we think building and sharing your marketing reports should be simple, so we created a library of 200+ free marketing report templates you can use to create the reports you need quickly and painlessly—no spreadsheets or screenshots required.
The reports you build in Databox update automatically, so sharing your updated reports with your boss/clients at the end of the week or month is as simple as emailing a link. And the best part: you can use them as long as you want to on our free forever plan and only upgrade to a premium plan if/when you need to.
And while you should definitely take time to peruse the entire template library to find the perfect reports for your needs, we wanted to help you get started quickly.
But first, before we get into all of that, we need to cover the basics:
A marketing report is an evaluation of the work the marketing team has completed during a specific period of time. It highlights the work that was done, and most importantly, the results generated (or not generated) from that work.
Basically, a marketing report is a summarization of two critical questions:
A good rule of thumb is to create and share a marketing report with your entire company once a month.
If you share them too frequently, say every week, there might not be enough change or variation in your performance in order to present any meaningful insights. So, while the marketing team should be aware of how performance is trending on a daily and weekly basis by checking in on important dashboards frequently, the rest of the company would stand to benefit from seeing a marketing report every month.
Now that you know what a marketing report is, you might be wondering what important segments to include in your first or next marketing report.
Depending on the purpose of the report, for whom you’re preparing the report and the data that is being reviewed. A good marketing report should include these 6 segments:
This section informs your team and/or clients about how well your team fared in achieving its set marketing goals and objectives in the past month. It provides details into what worked and what didn’t work in regards to your target audience, marketing channels, website engagement, and so on.
This section of your report provides an overview of your website analytics. It highlights how your website is doing in search engines and how much traffic is coming to your website and if you’re getting ROI for your SEO efforts.
If people are not converting upon reading your content, seeing your ad, visiting your landing page, that’s an indication something is wrong, which is why this section of your marketing report is important as it showcases how your site visitors found your website, how well your new and returning visitors are converting and how they progress through the marketing funnel (Visitor-Lead-MQL-SQL-Win Conversion rate), and the conversion costs incurred in the process.
If you have any active campaigns, then this section is a must as it provides unique insights into the health and performance of your campaigns.
This section highlights key metrics that impact your business visibility and revenue, such as ROI, Reach, Impressions, best-performing campaigns, and costs incurred and what you forecast your ad spend and ROAS will be.
This section outlines your marketing expenses and which marketing priorities should be included in your marketing budget– based on what worked and what didn’t generate revenue in the previous month(s).
Including this section is useful as it helps you keep an eye on your marketing budget to avoid wasting resources on things that don’t matter.
This lets your team and/or clients know how much progress has been made towards achieving your marketing goals, what needs to be changed or optimized, and steps you can take to do so.
Related article: https://databox.com/how-to-prepare-a-marketing-report
Here are 11 free plug-and-play marketing report templates from our library—all created by either us or our agency partners:
Created by: Databox
Your email marketing provider will tell you how your subscribers interacted with your marketing email, but what’s usually more important for is how subscribers interact with your website after clicking a link in an email you sent.
This template helps you answer the following questions:
All of this information not only helps you prove that your email marketing campaigns are driving traffic to your site, but it also helps you improve your future campaigns by showing you what your subscribers are most interested in.
Grab this template or discover the most important email marketing metrics.
Created by: Think Metrix
You could look at metrics in Google Analytics, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube separately, add the data from each platform to a spreadsheet, and use that spreadsheet to build a visual report showing the impact of your social media efforts across multiple platforms. But you’ll waste a lot of time doing so.
A better approach is to use a dashboard like the one above that consolidates data from multiple platforms to give you a complete picture of your social media marketing performance:
Grab this template or discover the most important social media metrics.
Created by: Pepperland Marketing
Even if you don’t pay for any SEO tools, you still probably need to grab data from both Google Analytics and Google Search Console to populate your weekly/monthly performance reports. And if you pay for premium SEO tools, those are just additional sources of data you need to consolidate into a single report.
Instead, you can use this dashboard that consolidates data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, and Moz to provide a complete picture of the SEO health of your website, answering questions like:
Grab this template or discover the most important SEO KPIs.
Created by: Databox
When you’re using your company blog for content marketing, there’s more to look at than just traffic and number of posts published.
To know if your content marketing efforts are really paying off for your brand, you need to understand if your blog posts are driving conversions and engaging visitors. And more importantly, you need to be able to identify which specific posts are doing the best job of generating conversions and engaging visitors.
This dashboard template makes it easy to answer those questions, showing blog KPIs like:
Grab this template or read more about how to use it.
Created by: Alaniz Marketing
If you’re a paid ads pro, you probably have experience with both social and PPC ads. The Facebook Ads and Google Ads interfaces are notoriously difficult, meaning if you want to get even basic data, you need to click into multiple screens, select multiple dropdowns, etc.
This dashboard will give a high-level overview that you can check every day to make sure you’re not wasting money on the wrong ads. “Campaigns Overview” shows which campaigns are being shown most often on Facebook, and “Keywords Overview” shows which keywords have generated the highest click-through rates.
This helps you answer a variety of questions:
Grab this template or discover the most important Google Ads metrics.
Created by: Pepperland Marketing
If you feel like you’re continuously releasing new content but not seeing enough impact, you will be able to tell what’s going wrong by using this template.
Perhaps your session count is growing but you’re not bringing in new users. That means the same people are reading your content over and over again! Or perhaps your bounce rate is steadily increasing. That means quality is going downhill and visitors aren’t staying on your site.
This template gives you a big-picture view of both acquisition metrics (traffic) and behavioral metrics (what people do on your site).
In the table on the right, you can check whether visitors are actually enjoying your content while they are on your site. If session duration or pages per session are low, you may need to overhaul your content rather than search for more traffic.
On the right side, you can see the top pages by pageviews. If traffic is decreasing, perhaps one popular page is not getting as much traffic as it did last month.
This helps you answer a variety of questions:
Grab this template or browse more Google Analytics report templates.
Created by: Databox
If you’re trying to grow the audience for your Facebook page through organic social media posting, this dashboard provides all of the metrics you need to measure your performance. You can see trends in your post reactions, clicks, and shares; monitor your total pages likes; and answer questions like:
Then, you can either share this dashboard with your boss or clients to highlight your wins or use what you learn from the data to continually improve your KPIs.
Grab this template or browse more Facebook marketing report templates.
Created by: Revenue River
Google is constantly trying to decide which ads will be served first. This is determined not only by your automatic bid for a placement but also the quality of the ad itself.
If you create an ad that is earning a high clickthrough rate, Google can give you a higher position. This becomes even more important for competitive keywords. A high-quality ad could determine whether your ads are more visible than your competitors’.
This dashboard does a great job of giving you an overview of your whole Google Ads account. It answers questions like:
Grab this template or browse more Google Ads report templates.
Created by: Yello Veedub
Tracking KPIs is crucial for all types of marketing, but it’s particularly key for advertising because if you’re not keeping a close watch on your ad spend and outcomes, you might be delivering a negative ROI.
This Facebook Ads report template helps you avoid that by answering questions like:
Keeping a close eye on the data in this dashboard will help you refine your Facebook ads for the best performance by keeping frequency low and ensuring that the amount you’re spending is less than the amount you’re earning in revenue.
Grab this template or browse more Facebook Ads report templates.
Created by: Square 2 Marketing
Ultimately, you want your website to generate leads. But you also need to have an understanding of which channels are scalable so that you can use your limited amount of time as wisely as possible.
This dashboard shows you which channels have been most responsible for your total lead count. Using this data, you can decide to focus your efforts more on the channels that are driving you closer to your goals, as well as scale down those that just aren’t really contributing to your company’s bottom line.
This helps you answer a variety of questions:
Grab this template or browse more HubSpot Marketing report templates.
Created by: Databox
Marketing KPIs extend beyond just the impacts of your team’s activities on traffic, leads, and revenue. If you’re running a marketing project, you also need a way to monitor and report on the status of that project. This Asana project overview dashboard makes that easy, giving you an overview of:
This gives you the high-level data you need to identify when a project is at risk for not being completed on time and within budget so you can check with your team before it’s too late and brainstorm ways to get things back on track.
Grab this template or view similar templates for Jira and Harvest.
Hopefully, these report templates give you some ideas on how to measure your work. But remember: you need to do more than just look at your metrics each month. You also need to make sure you’re taking action on the insights that the data provides.
At Databox, we have 10 goals across all departments: marketing, sales, product, and customer support.
At a monthly meeting, each team member shows the report that he/she has been tracking throughout the month. Since each metric also has a monthly goal attached to it, team members can share the actions they took over the course of the month to hit the goal—and what they might do differently the next month.
You can learn more about setting goals for your marketing team here.
Dashboards can easily overwhelm your boss or client with all the metrics, colors, and charts. That’s why it’s important to choose a small number of metrics that will determine success each month. Then, after you create monthly goals for each metric, you will have a clear story to tell when it’s time to share your report.
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Originally published in June 2018, this post has been updated with some more recent and helpful examples of marketing report templates from our template directory.
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