Marketing Agency Reporting

What is marketing agency reporting?

Marketing agencies do all sorts of things; from creating ads, to branding campaigns, to running a company’s social media. At the end of the day, though, their clients only really want to know one thing…

What were the results? Did the ad increase customer purchases? How many clicks did the email get? How much engagement did the Instagram post generate?

Marketing agency client reporting is a big aspect of agency reporting, as without the stats, your clients aren’t going to know what your efforts have achieved and have little reason to come back to you a second time.

The second aspect of agency marketing reporting is for the agency’s own sake. As a marketing agency, you want to know how YOU are doing as a business and need a way to track that.

In this blog, we’ll explore the various types of reports that you can run and what each is useful for, as well as discuss best practices for getting the most out of your reports.

Why is marketing agency reporting so important?

Simply speaking, the best way for your agency to show off its marketing prowess is by showing current and prospective clients how much money you are helping them make. 

The way you do that is through marketing metrics reports that show things like KPIs, click rates, and conversions.

Not only do reports show clients a breakdown of what you are doing for them, but they also prove why it’s worth their while to pay the amount that you are charging for your services. If you can show them the details and extent of the work behind the results you are producing for them, they will consider your fee an investment.  

Moving on to the marketing agency themselves, reports are what keep your agency healthy. Without running reports at least once a month, an agency soon descends into a chaos of confusion, where no one can accurately say whether the agency is progressing, regressing, or staying stagnant in its growth. Reports are vitally necessary for making insightful business decisions.

6 kinds of agency reports:

1. Social media report

Nowadays, social media is used heavily as a business tool; be it for advertising, campaigns, or just general posting to increase brand awareness.

The more on top of social media metrics an agency is, the better placed they are to make strategic decisions, such as which platform to use the most and what type of posts to focus on. 

Metrics you can use to track your social media success include:

• Reach
• Interactions
• Impressions
• New followers

2. SEO performance report

When it comes to blogs and websites, SEO performance is an important way of tracking success. You can have a super informative blog or a beautiful website, but if the SEO is poor, they won’t help anyone much as very few people will see them. Therefore, to track SEO performance, track metrics such as:

• Conversions
• Bounce rate
• Organic traffic
• Paid traffic
• Amount of time users stay on the page
  
  

3. Web analytics report

Web analytic reports are similar to SEO reports but focus more directly on the way users interact with the website.

Ways to track web metrics may overlap with SEO metrics and include:

• A device used to access the website
• Amount of time users stay on the page
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Amount of pages explored as well as most popular pages
• Website Traffic
• Demographics of people visiting the website

4. PPC campaign report

A pay-per-click campaign runs online ads, for which you pay a certain amount every time someone clicks on your ad.

The success of a PPC campaign can be measured using:

• Amount of clicks
• ROI
• Cost per click
• Click through rate
  
  

5. Email reports

Email reports give you insights into the success of your emails and indicate what you can do to improve success. Information such as which subject lines worked best, what timing is most conducive to a high open rate, and which demographic is most interested in your emails, can help you streamline your email marketing.

Track your email success using the following metrics:

• Open rate
• Click rate
• Click through rate
• Unsubscribes
• Bounces
• Replies

6. Time reports

Time reports are the way you measure how cost-effectively time is being used in your agency. Time reports give you a monthly breakdown of how employees spend their working hours, giving you a clear view of how you are spending your resources.

Useful metrics to track include:

• Time spent on tasks
• Total hours worked

Agency reporting best practices:

• Provide only relevant information: When providing clients with reports, you want to include only information that is relevant and interesting to the client. Your clients are busy and the service you are providing them with is only a small part of their focus. They don’t want to be swamped with uninteresting data.

• Templatize your reports: As an agency, presenting clients with reports is standard practice, and anything that is standard practice does well to be templatized. This way, instead of creating a customized document every time you send a report, you have that basic template and just fill it with the relevant information.
• Make them visually appealing: There’s a world of a difference between a black-and-white report with numbers and words squashed closely together and a sleek, colorful, and clear report. You want your clients to be motivated to actually read your reports and see how much your services are helping them. Using colorful diagrams goes a long way in making reports visually appealing.
  
  
• Dumb it down: Although stats like ‘high click-through rate’ might be ABCs to you, your client may not fully understand what that means and why it’s a positive thing for their business. Always err on the side of caution and make sure to explain what data on reports actually means.

• Reference past data: Imagine you’re working with an agency that previously had very little website traffic and you helped make a tremendous increase in that traffic. Showing them a report that shows current traffic is a good start, but you’d do much better to compare that to past data, highlighting the difference you have made. If you’ve made a positive change for a client, always compare current data to historical data in reports.

• Put the most important information first: Your client may only have a limited amount of time or patience to read the reports you send them. It’s therefore imperative that you place the data that you want them to see most, first. Let’s say your agency wrote a post that received a huge amount of engagement, as well as some other posts that were not as successful - put the most successful results first! Also, make sure that the data that is most important to your client is near the top.

• Include future plans: Make your clients feel secure in your agency's capabilities by referencing future plans. This is also important if the data in your reports is not so positive. Rather than trying to cover up unfavorable reports, which can easily lead to a lack of trust, be transparent and tell your client how you hope to do better in the future.

• Automate your report sending: This is an easy step to take that can save you hours of work. Program whatever marketing agency reporting tool it is that you use to send out weekly/monthly reports to clients. Assuming you are using marketing agency reporting software, your system will send out the most updated report and you won’t have to worry about remembering to do it manually.
  
  

How can Workamajig help you with your marketing agency reporting?

For some agencies, reporting is a pleasant and easy walk in the park. For others, it’s a monthly headache, zapping hours of precious time and creating lots of boring tasks for lots of employees.

So what’s the secret to happy, snappy reporting?

Simple: Marketing agency reporting tools.

With the best marketing agency reporting tools, you get to provide your clients as well as your own agency with effortless, beautiful reports. Without them, you get to spend many tedious hours pulling data from here, there, and everywhere, putting shoddy-looking reports together on your own. 

Piece of advice: don’t do it!

If you are a creative agency, the best software you can get for yourself is Workamajig - the only platform built especially for creative agencies.

Run your agency on hard data, not best guesses

Swap gut feelings for accurate data and dramatically improve your agency's profitability. Workamajig gives agency leaders the visibility needed to identify their best clients and highest-margin projects.

• Do more of what works. Identify & focus on the clients, projects & services that drive true profitability
• See how your key financial metrics trend over time with our easy-to-use Metrics Monitor
• Grow with confidence. Improve cash flow, make smart hiring decisions & build an agency that lasts

Integration gives you insight

Why use separate tools for time tracking, project management, resourcing, finance, and reporting? 

Get everyone on board & gain visibility across the board.

• Don't wait hours for reports - get the data you need, when you need it, in real-time
• No need to gather & merge data from other tools - just start analyzing
• Reliable forecasts let you proactively manage agency growth & resources
• Create reports for anyone, with the exact data they need

Make smart, data-backed decisions - explore Workamajig here