Not using automated report generation as a digital marketing agency works fine when you’re starting out, but any growing agency reaches a point where the time consuming cycle isn’t worth their time anymore:
- Manually retrieving data, usually from multiple different sources and platforms
- Compiling and organizing the data in an Excel or Google spreadsheet
- Analyzing the data you’ve collected and organized
- Creating, writing and designing reports, usually in PowerPoint or Google Slides
How much of your team’s valuable time and energy has been diverted away from the most important marketing functions due to some variation of this reporting process?
You can remedy this problem by selecting the right report automation tools, and fortunately the marketplace abounds with solutions.
Below we’ve prepared a breakdown of the 16 best reporting automation tools for digital marketers organized into categories based on how they’re utilized:
Before we dive in, if you need a tool to report on more than one of the use cases covered in this list, we’ve built ReportGarden, an all in one reporting solution for agencies that encompases all of the above.
ReportGarden (Try it Free)
- Pricing: Starts at $25/client (with a minimum of 10 clients); Contact for enterprise rate
- Rating: 4.5/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Marketing agency reporting software for digital campaigns
ReportGarden is an easy to use, customizable automated reporting tool. Colorful and visually appealing, the reports and dashboards are as practical as they are attractive: agencies can free up time to focus on optimizing campaign performance and hitting goals for their clients.
ReportGarden offers this not only for SEO campaigns, but also for PPC, Google Analytics, AdWords, and social media. The reporting functions allow flexibility in how you build out a report. It allows you to:
- Select the criteria for how data are segmented and organized
- Use a variety of available drag-and-drop widgets to help with data visualization
- Choose from a number of custom-built templates to highlight specific areas of your report
- Schedule reports to be generated and automatically emailed to your clients
Dashboards can be configured with the same level of flexibility, with a focus on showing your clients all the metrics that matter to them. They’ll be able to view all of the relevant KPIs in one central location, in real time.
Automated Reporting Tools for SEO
As SEO strategies evolve and become more complex, so does the demand for software that can not only deliver more sophisticated data analytics, but also clearly and quickly communicate insights that you can use to improve your campaigns.
The better offerings on the market offer well-designed and intuitive automated reporting tools that have been bundled into a larger, more comprehensive suite of software products.
Serpstat
- Pricing: Plans start at $69/month; Enterprise plans start at $499/month
- Rating: 4.6/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Site audits, backlink and keyword analysis, SERP rank tracking, side-by-side comparisons to competitors
Serpstat boasts an all-in-one SEO platform with over 20 individual tools, including an on-page audit providing instant analysis of your web pages. It can also identify your competitors and evaluate their SEO strategy, showing you a head-to-head comparison — your domain versus theirs.
For the massive wealth of raw data its tools generate, Serpstat strives to deliver a reporting function that keeps everything simple. It’s designed for those business users who may not necessarily be experienced in analytics. You get an overview of all analysis tied to your project via a single central dashboard, with more detailed reports just a few clicks away. Those reports aim to reduce complexity by rendering data into easy to understand, user-friendly infographics, charts and diagrams.
Serpstat also offers the ability to design fully customizable white label reports for clients, as well as automated email alerts notifying you of any changes in keyword or domain rankings.
Moz Pro
- Pricing: Starts at $99/month; Premium package for SEO-focused agencies is $999/month
- Rating: 4.4/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Site audits, backlink building tools, SERP rank tracker, keyword and competitor analysis
Moz Pro is another major player offering an all-inclusive suite of SEO-intensive tools. To keep your clients informed on their SEO results, you can continuously and automatically export all relevant data into customized client reports (with drag and drop graphs and charts).
Its tool “Site Crawl” has a reporting capability worthy of mention. Not only is it scheduled to crawl your site weekly seeking out an array of potential SEO-related weaknesses, but it spits out an automatic report alerting you to every issue found. It details why it’s negatively impacting your SEO, and then tells you exactly how you can fix it.
Clients, however, seem to find the most value in Moz Pro’s SEO toolbar, known as the “MozBar.” This overlay allows the end user to track and view a variety of metrics while viewing any SERP or domain page.
SEMrush
- Pricing: Starts at $99/month; Quote for customized plan provided on request
- Rating: 4.5/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Offers up to 30 distinct online marketing toolkits prominently focusing on SEO campaigns, but also encompasses areas such as advertising, content, market research and social media
Like other players in this space, SEMrush touts its own automated reporting function. “My Reports” allows you to access data from any of SEMrush’s numerous tools and build customized reports through the use of drag-and-drop widgets. To enhance with deeper layers of detail, you may add annotations or comments. There is also a scheduling function allowing you to share reports through email or direct links.
Similar to Moz Pro’s “Moz Bar,” this vendor has “SEOquake,” a free plugin compatible with nearly any web browser. For any web page the tool pulls a wealth of analytical data and displays for you a variety of SEO metrics specific to that page.
For any SERP, you’ll get data specific to every result listed. It also includes features such as keyword density reporting and instant SEO “audits” of landing pages.
Raven Tools
- Pricing: Starts at $79/month; Enterprise plan is $399/month
- Rating: 4.3 on G2
- Capabilities: Site audits, keyword analysis, SERP rank tracking, competitor analysis
Another all-in-one offering, Raven Tools heavily promotes its automated reporting function, with its ability to consolidate and pull data from over 30 different platforms, including Google Analytics, AdWords and Bing. Through a dashboard, you can quickly pick and choose the metrics you wish to highlight, without jumping across different data sources to find what you need.
If you prefer, you can create reports from scratch, or if you need a report in minutes, you can build templates that will auto-generate a report on demand.
One interesting feature is its brand alert function: whenever your brand or domain is mentioned or linked to from another domain, Raven Tools can send an automated notification.
Automated Reporting Tools for PPC Marketing
Pay-per-click advertising raises a series of questions for marketers, including questions on where to allocate ad dollars, how to track your competition, and how to choose the right channels. Below you’ll find software that helps you analyze all of these issues, complete with reporting components.
Optmyzr
- Pricing: Options depend on monthly ad spend and the number of accounts you manage
- Rating: 4.5/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Platform specifically designed for PPC campaign management
Optmyzr was named the best PPC management software suite at the 2018 US Search Awards. It contains a powerful array of tools to increase efficiency and performance in Google Ads, Bing and even Amazon ad campaigns.
It has an equally strong reporting functionality that gives you wide latitude in how you can compile, manipulate and display campaign results. Data can be formatted as a downloadable PDF, an interactive dashboard, or a slideshow. A variety of widgets allow you to show data in charts or tables, but also in innovative formats such as word clouds and heatmaps.
You also have access to report templates and tools that let you configure automated reports that can be emailed to clients on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule.
DashThis
- Pricing: Starts at $33/month; Enterprise plan is $499/month
- Rating: 4.8/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Track and report all of your PPC KPI’s through a white labeled dashboard
DashThis allows you to plug in all of your marketing tools to improve your decision making, produce automated reports, and prove your value to clients. It’s white label functionality allows you to tailor the design and URLs of your reports so they’ll always have a custom look that will impress clients.
Plus, DashThis integrates with way more than your standard platforms. With 34+ native integrations, the tool is likely to work with whichever PPC platforms you’re using so you can get up and running immediately.
See how DashThis compares to other top reporting software in our article DashThis vs. Cyfe vs. ReportGarden.
Octoboard
- Pricing: Starts at $25/month; Enterprise rates begin at $150/month
- Rating: 5.0/5 on Capterra
- Capabilities: PPC tool with advanced reporting automation
Octoboard offers an impressive automated reporting tool that allows you to connect your data sources, choose from templates to white label your reports, and present real-time analytics to your clients through user friendly dashboards.
Octoboard boasts an intuitive user interface that allows you to easily set up your custom reports for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Bing. And you can monitor KPI targets like clicks, costs, and conversions to effectively track progress on the goals you set.
Website Analytics Automated Reporting Tools
How are you tracking what’s happening on a client’s website once people visit? Are you relying on Google Analytics? There are a number of other tools available, all utilizing automated reporting to deliver data insights. These services all capitalize on the limitations of Google analytics, providing deeper insights than you would otherwise have access to.
Leadfeeder
- Pricing: “Lite” version with limited features is free; Premium versions start at $53/month
- Rating: 4.6/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Sales lead generation app with reporting functionality
The Leadfeeder app gives you enhanced sales intelligence about prospective buyers by telling you which people and companies are visiting your client’s website and what pages they’re viewing. All it requires is access to your Google Analytics account.
From there, Leadfeeder has a variety of automated reporting mechanisms that will send the data directly. With the ability to integrate with a company’s existing CRM, it will feed new leads straight into the pipeline so salespeople can be alerted to new activity. It features a lead scoring mechanism that places the “hottest” leads at the top of the list, and also allows for filtering by specific criteria you can set.
Leadfeeder’s “Booster” option pushes data to you up to 12 times per day. Its personal email alert function will instantly send a notification whenever specific companies visit your website, which allows for quick follow-up with potential buyers.
GoSquared
- Pricing: “Pay for what you need” model, from $29/month up to $299/month, based off of the number of website page views
- Rating: 4.5/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Website analytics tool with reporting functionality
GoSquared promotes its website analytics offering as a more user friendly, more responsive and less complicated alternative to Google Analytics. It instantly delivers a wide variety of updated metrics on all visitor activity to your website.
GoSquared touts a very easy setup process: once it’s installed, there’s no further configuration needed, nor do you need to go down a learning curve by reading user manuals: according to the company, the dashboards immediately “jump to life” and begin automatically delivering data.
To further distinguish itself from Google Analytics, it emphasizes that its reports produce real-time metrics, with no wait. It also protects the privacy of individual users by making personal information anonymous — a direct reference to Google’s data collection practice of using personal information for purposes beyond simply reporting of metrics.
Matomo
- Pricing: Starts at $9/month for basic; $29/month for business package; Contact company for details on Enterprise option
- Rating: 4/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Website analytics tool with reporting functionality
Matomo is reported to be the leading open-source web analytics platform, and has on-premise and cloud-based hosting options. It differentiates itself from Google Analytics by stressing that its platform offers 100% data ownership and 100% accuracy in data reporting (once website traffic reaches a certain limit, Google caps its reporting and relies on data sampling instead).
Its reporting function allows you to get whatever specific data insights you need on your website activity by choosing from over 200 different metrics and dimensions. Once you choose your filters, a report comes your way within seconds.
If these are reports you’ll need often, you can set them up to be viewed whenever desired, or emailed automatically to clients at different time intervals.
StatCounter
- Pricing: Free to $399/month, depending upon usage
- Rating: 4.3/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Website analytics tool with dashboard and reporting functionality
StatCounter is another robust suite of analytics products allowing you to track website traffic trends, analyze keyword data, and monitor paid traffic (among other functions). Its simple user interface and terminology is designed for small businesses that might not have a digital marketing expert on their team.
It says it is intended as an alternative to Google Analytics that doesn’t require extensive training or acclimating to numerous levels of navigation menus. It also goes beyond Google by offering detailed insights on individual visitors, and letting you set an automated alert when specific individuals return to your site.
If desired, a user can click on a specific single report for deeper analysis. For those who’d rather see the reports in their inbox, you can configure customized reports sent on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It also offers mobile-friendly formatting for those on the go.
Social Media Reporting Tools
Platforms specializing in the management of a client’s social media marketing efforts have proliferated in recent years, with suites of software tools that attempt to simplify the process across networks. It’s not uncommon to see competing vendors with similar offerings, with little apparent difference from one to the other.
Still, there are a number of leading-edge products available, and bundling powerful automated reporting tools within them appears to have become common practice. Here are a few of those products.
Send Social Media
- Pricing: Starts at $59/month; “Ultimate” plan is $199/month
- Rating: 4/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Social media marketing management software with CRM and reporting functionality
The central hub of Send Social Media is it’s all-in-one social media dashboard, from which you can operate all of it’s powerful tools. You can monitor your campaigns, engage with users and publish to various networks (it supports over 30).
By virtue of simply being on the dashboard, you’re tuned in to its analytics function, which is already tracking all manner of relevant data, including clicks, shares, comments, views and more. You can pull up all of these metrics to evaluate how your campaigns are doing.
Send Social Media allows you to customize and run reports that you can email to clients at any interval, detailing the metrics you choose. And if you prefer to create your own reports, there is a function that exports the raw data to a .csv file.
Zoho Social
- Pricing: Standard plan beginning at $10/month; Agency Plus plan is $300/month
- Rating: 4.5/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Comprehensive social media management platform with automated client reporting
Zoho Social allows you to collaborate with your team to create and manage your content calendar across social channels, monitor and analyze your progress, and automate your social media reporting.
This multi-channel tool integrates with all of the most popular networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. It’s listening dashboard helps you monitor valuable social metrics by tracking things like reviews, keywords, and mentions so you can evaluate your business performance with the perspectives of your actual customers.
With Zoho Social, you have the ability to customize your social marketing reports and choose the frequency and times in which they are shared with your clients to make your job easier and keep your clients informed.
Social Report
- Pricing: Starts at $49/month; Enterprise/agency plan is $199/month
- Rating: 4.5/5 on G2
- Capabilities: All-in-one social media management platform
Social Report is another leading platform specializing in social media management. It offers a sophisticated analytics component tracking numerous aspects of all of your social media profiles, as well as those of your competitors, if you need a side-by-side comparison.
Tied closely to its data analysis tool is its reporting capability, which is versatile. There are hundreds of reports from which to choose:
- First, you can select a report focused on a specific metric, such as engagement, audience analysis, hashtags, or activity by country.
- Beyond this, you can run a report devoted to a specific platform, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and get details on the unique features of each.
- You can run a cross-platform report comparing and contrasting activity among all of your networks.
Like other offerings, Social Report enables you to pick and choose from numerous templates, or pull selected sections out to build your own based on your client’s needs. Once you’ve settled on a format, it can be automated to send out on a regular basis.
Sprout Social
- Pricing: Starts at $99 per user/month; Advanced plan is $249 per user/month
- Rating: 4.3/5 on G2
- Capabilities: Comprehensive social media management platform encompassing publishing, listening, engagement and analytics
Sprout Social differentiates itself from competitors by offering a platform that can adapt and scale to the needs of any user — from a small business to an enterprise level operation to an agency. It also boasts a strong customer support team, as well as training and educational materials to help you get the most out of Sprout’s toolset.
Sprout has a deep set of management tools for each specific social media network, with analytics and reporting capabilities to match. Its user friendly Report Builder lets you choose from a wide variety of formats to create customizable, automated business reports, using advanced filtering of criteria, your choice of charts and graphs, and a menu of over 150 different metrics.
Conclusion
The abundance of report automation tools that exist in the market today should come as no surprise, because these tools help save on the #1 nonrenewable resource for every business: time.
If you’re searching for tools based on the use cases of reporting on SEO, PPC, web analytics, or social media, we hope this article will allow you to select the best service for your business.
One of the best ways to decide which tool will work best for you is to start with trying out a service. We believe our product stands up next to the best of them, and we offer a free trial (no credit card requried!) that you can start today.
