Reporting to leadership and clients on the results your marketing campaigns drive is a part of the job—but that doesn’t mean it should take hours out of your week or divert your focus off of growing those marketing efforts.
That’s the situation Sven-Anders Alwerud was in. Sven’s the Digital Director for plant-based protein drink company Koia. In his digital marketing role, he’s responsible for putting together weekly and monthly marketing reports on the digital campaigns he runs across Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
Sven has a process in place for pulling marketing performance report data each week—but, like many marketers, he isn’t in love with it. According to Sven, the process accomplishes what he needs, but it’s:
- Time-consuming
- Manual
- Tedious
We asked Sven to take us through his process from start to finish, so we could see if our marketing reporting tool can solve for some of the pains he’s facing (spoiler alert: it can).
In this article, we’re taking you through the nitty-gritty of Sven’s process and explaining how one ReportGarden template can save Sven (and maybe you) 3+ hours every week.
Want to test out our templates? You can access and test them out in our 7-day free trial.
Sven’s Marketing Report Process
For Koia, monthly reporting to leadership starts with data gathering and analysis on a weekly basis.
On Sven’s side, regular reporting actually started with countless hours spent building a spreadsheet in Google Sheets. He needed the sheet to accommodate several campaigns across Facebook, Google, and Amazon and to include the specific metrics that he and his leadership team care about.
Once the spreadsheet was built, Sven’s weekly process took shape.
Step 1: Log into Koia’s Facebook Ads Manager account and set the appropriate time frame for the week he’s reporting on.
Step 2: Export the metrics he’ll report on into his spreadsheet.
Step 3: This is one of the most tedious aspects of Sven’s process. The data is in his spreadsheet, but it’s all disorganized. That means he needs to manually sort and organize that data into the right Google Sheet tab and cell—each metric individually. In his case, the important metrics include:
- Ad spend
- Post engagement
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Click-through rate (CTR)
And he tracks each of these metrics for several campaigns at any given time.
Step 4: Next, log into another tool, Woobox, to gather additional data that isn’t in Facebook Ads Manager, including emails collected, and calculate each campaign’s cost per email.
Step 5: The next step is to… repeat the entire process again for Google Display and Amazon Fresh campaigns.
Step 6: Finally, Sven has all the data he needs, organized into his spreadsheet. Only now can he turn that raw data into graphs, slides, and other presentation materials that are ready for leadership to see.
Why the Monthly Marketing Report Process is Painful
Reading through the process Sven follows every week, there are some obvious pains. Chiefly, Sven highlighted these challenges he’d love to eliminate:
- This process drains around 3 hours of his time every week. Koia is a small company with a limited number of employees and a limited amount of time. For every hour Sven spends manually pulling and sorting key performance indicators (KPIs), that’s an hour he can’t spend wearing his Director hat and working on marketing strategy or growth.
- As Sven’s monthly marketing reports get better and more comprehensive, it adds (not subtracts) work for him—so there’s an inherent limit to how much reporting he can really do and how granular he can get. Not to mention, those countless hours spent building the spreadsheet don’t really make his regular reporting any easier or faster.
- Until he manually brings it together, data from the three platforms Sven reports on—Facebook, Google, and Amazon—is completely siloed away. That makes it hard to analyze campaigns across platforms and report on performance in a cohesive way.
How Our Monthly Marketing Report Template Creates a Better Process
Sven’s process and the challenges it presents for him echo what we’ve heard from hundreds of other marketers—and it exemplifies many of the pains we set out to solve with our marketing agency reporting software.
When you use ReportGarden to do monthly marketing reports:
- You can connect data from more than 18 different sources, including SEO, social media KPIs, Google Analytics, paid search, and more.
- That data is automatically pulled, in real-time, into your reports and dashboards and displayed in a fully customizable, visual format.
- You can effortlessly scale marketing reports to include as many data sources, marketing activities, and metrics—from conversion rate to website traffic—as you need.
Here’s the bottom line: By building your monthly marketing reports in ReportGarden, you get back those 3+ weekly hours spent manually pulling and organizing data and reformulating it for leadership and/or clients.
How to Implement the Template
- Step 1: Create a ReportGarden account or log into an existing account.
- Step 2: Link your account with any channels you’re managing (Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Step 3: Once connected, click on the ‘NEW+’ button and select ‘Dashboard’.
- Step 4: Choose the ready-made PPC template, then hit ‘Generate a dashboard’. From there, you can customize the dashboard, add widgets, and share access with leadership or clients.
That’s it! Your dashboard is ready to go. For your monthly report, simply open the dashboard to get visualized, real-time data on your marketing campaigns. And if you want, you can use our automated scheduling feature to send your reports out at the frequency of your choice.
Make Monthly Marketing Reporting Better
There are a lot of ways to make reporting on the past month’s marketing performance manual, tedious, and time-consuming—but you only need one way to make it better.
By using our ready-made templates and data connections, you can shave hours off your weekly reporting, and reinvest that time back into growing your campaigns and improving your KPIs.
Want to test out our templates? You can access and test them out in our 7-day free trial.
