How to Do Marketing Reporting

Updated March 3, 2025

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Filling In Your Report Card

Marketing, like any job, is a results-based business. If you’re a marketer, you often have a fairly good idea of how your digital marketing campaigns are going. From the work you’re putting in and the results you see, you probably know whether you’re on track. However, that may not always be the case for the rest of your team. According to an Adobe survey, 76% of marketers believe the industry has transformed more in the past two years than in the previous fifty. Let’s see if our marketing reporting has kept pace.

So, how do you go about doing marketing reporting?

Set Goals—First things first, if you’re going to report on something, you need to have goals. If you’re reporting to your CEO, you both need to understand your specific marketing goals and how you can achieve them. Deciding to get 2,000 likes on your Facebook page is great, but what work will that entail? And what will the ultimate business goal be? How many people will it take, etc.? Once you have a plan, it is easier to contextualize your results.

Make Sure You’re Measuring the Right Things – It’s easy to drown in statistics and marketing metrics these days. The important thing is to find out which ones matter to you and your business. As mentioned above, maybe Facebook likes is useful for your business. Many of our clients don’t necessarily see a strong correlation between Facebook likes/engagement and sales. Perhaps you want to use Facebook as a customer service interface, and therefore, raising awareness — either through organic postings or FB ads — is an important measure. Returning to the goal-setting point, you need to work out what metrics to measure. It’s different from business to business and can vary from channel to channel

Know Your Audience – Tailoring your data points is key to marketing reporting. Let’s use Facebook likes as an example; this could be a useful metric for you to judge progress. However, your CEO is more interested in how many website referrals are generated from Facebook. And the VP of Customer Service is probably more interested in how many customer queries were resolved (and comparing those stats month to month). Knowing who you’re speaking to will help you fine-tune your reporting to focus on things they really care about.

Include an Overview—Detailed reports are important in understanding how a campaign is going. You can’t always see ROI instantly from looking at a table with CTR data in it. Especially if you’re reporting up to the C-Suite, management may not have the time or inclination to sift through detailed reporting. By providing an executive summary or overview, you can highlight important data or trends. Plus, it shows you’re focused on the bigger picture and not stuck in the weeds.

Learn to Predict the Future—Once you’ve set up your marketing reporting system, run it over a couple of quarters. You’ll start to see trends and get more comfortable anticipating stats. Predicting future performance is often like predicting the weather; eventually, you’ll notice trends or patterns.

Do you struggle with marketing reporting? Do you think the huge amount of data available to marketers helps or complicates things?