Monthly Marketing Reports: What KPIs to Include
Monthly Marketing Reports: What KPIs to Include
Monthly Marketing Reports: What KPIs to Include
Are you wondering what the best KPIs are for your monthly marketing reports?
Welcome to the final post in our 3 part series on daily, weekly, and monthly marketing reports. In the first 2 articles, we covered what KPIs you should be tracking in daily and weekly reports.
If you haven’t read those yet, you can find them by clicking on the links below:
Today, we’ll be looking at monthly marketing reports and what metrics you should consider adding to them.
As always, though, your marketing reports will be 100% unique to your business and your goals. Keep in mind that the KPIs listed in this post are suggestions, not rules written in stone.
Before we get started though, let’s get clear on what monthly marketing reports are and why they matter.
What Are Monthly Marketing Reports?
Monthly marketing reports are one of the most useful reports for digital marketing teams. They are spaced to give you strategic insight into your marketing activities.
Your monthly reports should give an overview of all your different digital marketing activities and how they are performing. You’ll want to include a range of KPIs that indicate whether you are on track to meet your goals, highlight particularly successful campaigns, and flag any areas for concern.
As every marketer knows, it takes time for some forms of digital marketing to show results. SEO and social media marketing are especially like marathons rather than sprints.
While you’ll want to keep an eye on some of these KPIs in your daily and weekly reports too, your monthly reports give you a way of tracking longer-term trends. And it’s these trends that will inform your wider marketing and content creation strategy.
Many clients and senior managers want to see monthly reports from you, as well. It’s an ideal time to demonstrate your progress and how your campaigns are helping the company reach its goals.
Your monthly reports will often sit alongside information from other teams to help company leaders get an overall idea of how the business is doing. So, you should focus on KPIs that have strategic importance.
Ideally, monthly marketing reports should also be visual and easy to understand at a glance. Don’t forget that you’ll be sharing them with non-marketers, so you want to represent your KPIs in a way that is clear to someone with less experience of the nitty-gritty of digital marketing than you.
Busy clients or senior managers will likely have a lot of reports to wade through each month. The easier you can make it for them to understand yours and compare data with previous months, the better.
Now that we’ve taken a look at what monthly marketing reports are, let’s check out which KPIs you’ll want to add to them.
KPIs for Your Monthly Marketing Reports
Because your monthly reports are often useful to more than just your own team, you want to be a little more detailed than you might be in your more frequent weekly or daily reports.
But you also don’t want to overwhelm people with irrelevant data. Finding the sweet spot between too little information and too much is the tricky part.
When choosing which KPIs to include in your monthly reports, ask yourself if they will help you build a comprehensive view of your digital marketing activities. If a metric doesn’t relate to your company’s strategic goals and doesn’t give you genuinely actionable insights, don’t include it.
In this post, we’ll break down the KPIs to include in your monthly report by the following categories:
Ad spend
Brand awareness
Performance by platform
SEO
Let’s get started.
1) Ad Spend
Whether your reports are being shared with clients or with other teams within the same company, one question that everyone wants an answer to is: "how much have we spent, and was it worth it?".
KPIs that help you monitor your return on ad spend (ROAS) should be front and center in your monthly marketing reports.
For some of these, you may need to work with the sales team to track how leads generated by your campaigns perform. But many are available via Google Ads, Google Analytics, or the various social media platforms.
Here are the most common KPIs to track your ROAS:
Total ad spend
Ad spend per campaign
Cost-per-click
Cost-per-conversion
Conversion rate, broken down by campaign and by platform
Revenue generated by each campaign and platform (this is where you might need input from your sales team)
Out of all of these, the most important tend to be:
Cost-per-conversion
Revenue generated
At the end of the day, these tell you how much it costs to get a conversion and whether or not you’re making more than you spend.
2) Brand Awareness
Everyone likes to see that the money is moving in the right direction. But your company or clients are also aware of the value of building brand awareness.
Although it’s a harder thing to put a monetary figure against, the more people who know about your business and what you do, the more potential future customers you have.
So, you’ll want to monitor KPIs that show you’re successfully building your audience and reaching new people.
Because there are many KPIs you can track to monitor your brand awareness, I’ve broken this down into different categories.
You are looking for metrics that show roughly how many people your content has reached and whether they engaged with it. Here are the KPIs broken down by the most popular categories:
Social media engagement:
Follower growth rate
Reach (or impressions, where reach is unavailable)
Engagement rate
Click-through-rate
Email marketing
List growth rate
New subscribers
Unsubscribe rate
Open rate
Click-through-rate
PPC
Reach
Share of impressions
Click-through-rate
Website traffic
Total sessions
Unique visitors
New visitors
These KPIs are the most commonly used in each category they’re under. This is the perfect example of why you need to select the right KPIs for your goals specifically.
Some companies may focus more on social media than they do on paid ads. As such, they’d want to track things like follower growth rate and reach and would have no need for click-through rates from ads.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there is no cookie-cutter approach to building your reports (daily, weekly, or monthly).
3) Marketing Performance by Platform
Once you’ve looked into your budget and your brand awareness, you’ll want to start thinking about planning for the future. And that means you need to know what worked, what didn’t, and which platforms are sending the most potential customers your way.
Comparing results for different platforms and campaigns can give you vital insights that will help you plan your next move. And it’s useful information for the rest of the company (or your clients) to have, too.
If your sales team can see that they’re getting lots of leads from a particular source, they can adapt their sales approach to fit the content you share on that platform.
Assuming that your main goal is to drive people through to your website, there are several useful KPIs you can track to help you uncover your most successful marketing activities:
Website traffic source and medium
Sessions/users by campaign
Goal conversion rate by campaign or source
Bounce rate by channel
Most popular landing pages
Most popular blog posts
You might also monitor your click-through-rate for both organic and paid content on your various marketing channels. You can compare this to see which platform gives you the most engaged audience.
Out of all the KPIs listed above, I’m a big fan of tracking popular blog posts for content marketers. This will be a great indicator of what your target audience loves so you can plan to create more content around that topic.
4) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Finally, your monthly reports are an ideal place to look at how well your SEO efforts are working for you. As we’ve already discussed, SEO requires a long-term investment before it starts to show results.
That said, comparing stats from month to month will help you see if things are moving in the right direction.
Organic searches are still one of the most effective ways to drive potential customers to your website. So, you’ll want to know whether your strategy is working.
SEO KPIs might be something that you only include in your own team’s reports, or that you build a separate report around, as it can be difficult to neatly summarise in a visually appealing chart.
If you do take that approach, consider highlighting the percentage of your website traffic coming from organic searches in your general report as a quick indicator of SEO performance.
Other than traffic from organic searches, KPIs that help you monitor your SEO efforts include:
Organic traffic by landing page
Bounce rate for organic traffic
Conversion rate from organic traffic
Most popular search queries
Click-through-rate by search query
Average position on the page for popular search queries
These are all KPIs that you can get from free Google tools like Google Analytics.
I mention this because many people think you need expensive tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to track your SEO progress.
While these definitely help track keywords and your competitor’s content strategy, you can get a lot of mileage from Google’s free tools.
This is especially important for smaller businesses just starting out who don’t have a huge budget for expensive SEO tools.
Building Your Monthly Marketing Reports
Lastly, you need to know how to compile all the data into a single monthly report for your team or clients. For that, you have 2 options.
First, you can compile all the data manually in something like a Google spreadsheet. But this often leads to unnecessary errors in the data.
Or it requires you to pay somebody to put it in by hand. If you’re building lots of reports, this isn’t just time-consuming; it’s also expensive.
Your second option is using a report builder like Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is one of your best bets for building automated monthly marketing reports. It has a drag and drop builder which means you don’t need to be ‘tech-savvy’ to get started.
In fact, you can build reports from all of your favorite marketing channels in a matter of minutes. When they’re ready, you simply select the recipient and decide when you want to send these reports.
From there, they’ll be automatically sent straight to your recipients’ inbox.
That last part is important. That’s because many marketing report builders only allow you to share reports with a PDF attachment or through a 3rd-party URL.
Both of these options add friction to the report-sharing process that, frankly, I never saw the point to. That’s exactly why I built Metrics Watch: to get people the data they need in a format they already know.
It’s one of the reasons why the German stock trading company, onvista, chose Metrics Watch over 20 other tools.
And that’s it! These have been the most popular KPIs to include in your monthly marketing reports.
I hope you found this post helpful. If you did, you might also want to check out the following resources:
These articles will have everything you need to create better marketing reports to get a better ROI from your marketing strategy.
Want to see Metrics Watch in action for yourself? Just click below to start your 100% FREE 14-day trial (no credit card required):
Are you wondering what the best KPIs are for your monthly marketing reports?
Welcome to the final post in our 3 part series on daily, weekly, and monthly marketing reports. In the first 2 articles, we covered what KPIs you should be tracking in daily and weekly reports.
If you haven’t read those yet, you can find them by clicking on the links below:
Today, we’ll be looking at monthly marketing reports and what metrics you should consider adding to them.
As always, though, your marketing reports will be 100% unique to your business and your goals. Keep in mind that the KPIs listed in this post are suggestions, not rules written in stone.
Before we get started though, let’s get clear on what monthly marketing reports are and why they matter.
What Are Monthly Marketing Reports?
Monthly marketing reports are one of the most useful reports for digital marketing teams. They are spaced to give you strategic insight into your marketing activities.
Your monthly reports should give an overview of all your different digital marketing activities and how they are performing. You’ll want to include a range of KPIs that indicate whether you are on track to meet your goals, highlight particularly successful campaigns, and flag any areas for concern.
As every marketer knows, it takes time for some forms of digital marketing to show results. SEO and social media marketing are especially like marathons rather than sprints.
While you’ll want to keep an eye on some of these KPIs in your daily and weekly reports too, your monthly reports give you a way of tracking longer-term trends. And it’s these trends that will inform your wider marketing and content creation strategy.
Many clients and senior managers want to see monthly reports from you, as well. It’s an ideal time to demonstrate your progress and how your campaigns are helping the company reach its goals.
Your monthly reports will often sit alongside information from other teams to help company leaders get an overall idea of how the business is doing. So, you should focus on KPIs that have strategic importance.
Ideally, monthly marketing reports should also be visual and easy to understand at a glance. Don’t forget that you’ll be sharing them with non-marketers, so you want to represent your KPIs in a way that is clear to someone with less experience of the nitty-gritty of digital marketing than you.
Busy clients or senior managers will likely have a lot of reports to wade through each month. The easier you can make it for them to understand yours and compare data with previous months, the better.
Now that we’ve taken a look at what monthly marketing reports are, let’s check out which KPIs you’ll want to add to them.
KPIs for Your Monthly Marketing Reports
Because your monthly reports are often useful to more than just your own team, you want to be a little more detailed than you might be in your more frequent weekly or daily reports.
But you also don’t want to overwhelm people with irrelevant data. Finding the sweet spot between too little information and too much is the tricky part.
When choosing which KPIs to include in your monthly reports, ask yourself if they will help you build a comprehensive view of your digital marketing activities. If a metric doesn’t relate to your company’s strategic goals and doesn’t give you genuinely actionable insights, don’t include it.
In this post, we’ll break down the KPIs to include in your monthly report by the following categories:
Ad spend
Brand awareness
Performance by platform
SEO
Let’s get started.
1) Ad Spend
Whether your reports are being shared with clients or with other teams within the same company, one question that everyone wants an answer to is: "how much have we spent, and was it worth it?".
KPIs that help you monitor your return on ad spend (ROAS) should be front and center in your monthly marketing reports.
For some of these, you may need to work with the sales team to track how leads generated by your campaigns perform. But many are available via Google Ads, Google Analytics, or the various social media platforms.
Here are the most common KPIs to track your ROAS:
Total ad spend
Ad spend per campaign
Cost-per-click
Cost-per-conversion
Conversion rate, broken down by campaign and by platform
Revenue generated by each campaign and platform (this is where you might need input from your sales team)
Out of all of these, the most important tend to be:
Cost-per-conversion
Revenue generated
At the end of the day, these tell you how much it costs to get a conversion and whether or not you’re making more than you spend.
2) Brand Awareness
Everyone likes to see that the money is moving in the right direction. But your company or clients are also aware of the value of building brand awareness.
Although it’s a harder thing to put a monetary figure against, the more people who know about your business and what you do, the more potential future customers you have.
So, you’ll want to monitor KPIs that show you’re successfully building your audience and reaching new people.
Because there are many KPIs you can track to monitor your brand awareness, I’ve broken this down into different categories.
You are looking for metrics that show roughly how many people your content has reached and whether they engaged with it. Here are the KPIs broken down by the most popular categories:
Social media engagement:
Follower growth rate
Reach (or impressions, where reach is unavailable)
Engagement rate
Click-through-rate
Email marketing
List growth rate
New subscribers
Unsubscribe rate
Open rate
Click-through-rate
PPC
Reach
Share of impressions
Click-through-rate
Website traffic
Total sessions
Unique visitors
New visitors
These KPIs are the most commonly used in each category they’re under. This is the perfect example of why you need to select the right KPIs for your goals specifically.
Some companies may focus more on social media than they do on paid ads. As such, they’d want to track things like follower growth rate and reach and would have no need for click-through rates from ads.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there is no cookie-cutter approach to building your reports (daily, weekly, or monthly).
3) Marketing Performance by Platform
Once you’ve looked into your budget and your brand awareness, you’ll want to start thinking about planning for the future. And that means you need to know what worked, what didn’t, and which platforms are sending the most potential customers your way.
Comparing results for different platforms and campaigns can give you vital insights that will help you plan your next move. And it’s useful information for the rest of the company (or your clients) to have, too.
If your sales team can see that they’re getting lots of leads from a particular source, they can adapt their sales approach to fit the content you share on that platform.
Assuming that your main goal is to drive people through to your website, there are several useful KPIs you can track to help you uncover your most successful marketing activities:
Website traffic source and medium
Sessions/users by campaign
Goal conversion rate by campaign or source
Bounce rate by channel
Most popular landing pages
Most popular blog posts
You might also monitor your click-through-rate for both organic and paid content on your various marketing channels. You can compare this to see which platform gives you the most engaged audience.
Out of all the KPIs listed above, I’m a big fan of tracking popular blog posts for content marketers. This will be a great indicator of what your target audience loves so you can plan to create more content around that topic.
4) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Finally, your monthly reports are an ideal place to look at how well your SEO efforts are working for you. As we’ve already discussed, SEO requires a long-term investment before it starts to show results.
That said, comparing stats from month to month will help you see if things are moving in the right direction.
Organic searches are still one of the most effective ways to drive potential customers to your website. So, you’ll want to know whether your strategy is working.
SEO KPIs might be something that you only include in your own team’s reports, or that you build a separate report around, as it can be difficult to neatly summarise in a visually appealing chart.
If you do take that approach, consider highlighting the percentage of your website traffic coming from organic searches in your general report as a quick indicator of SEO performance.
Other than traffic from organic searches, KPIs that help you monitor your SEO efforts include:
Organic traffic by landing page
Bounce rate for organic traffic
Conversion rate from organic traffic
Most popular search queries
Click-through-rate by search query
Average position on the page for popular search queries
These are all KPIs that you can get from free Google tools like Google Analytics.
I mention this because many people think you need expensive tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to track your SEO progress.
While these definitely help track keywords and your competitor’s content strategy, you can get a lot of mileage from Google’s free tools.
This is especially important for smaller businesses just starting out who don’t have a huge budget for expensive SEO tools.
Building Your Monthly Marketing Reports
Lastly, you need to know how to compile all the data into a single monthly report for your team or clients. For that, you have 2 options.
First, you can compile all the data manually in something like a Google spreadsheet. But this often leads to unnecessary errors in the data.
Or it requires you to pay somebody to put it in by hand. If you’re building lots of reports, this isn’t just time-consuming; it’s also expensive.
Your second option is using a report builder like Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is one of your best bets for building automated monthly marketing reports. It has a drag and drop builder which means you don’t need to be ‘tech-savvy’ to get started.
In fact, you can build reports from all of your favorite marketing channels in a matter of minutes. When they’re ready, you simply select the recipient and decide when you want to send these reports.
From there, they’ll be automatically sent straight to your recipients’ inbox.
That last part is important. That’s because many marketing report builders only allow you to share reports with a PDF attachment or through a 3rd-party URL.
Both of these options add friction to the report-sharing process that, frankly, I never saw the point to. That’s exactly why I built Metrics Watch: to get people the data they need in a format they already know.
It’s one of the reasons why the German stock trading company, onvista, chose Metrics Watch over 20 other tools.
And that’s it! These have been the most popular KPIs to include in your monthly marketing reports.
I hope you found this post helpful. If you did, you might also want to check out the following resources:
These articles will have everything you need to create better marketing reports to get a better ROI from your marketing strategy.
Want to see Metrics Watch in action for yourself? Just click below to start your 100% FREE 14-day trial (no credit card required):
Are you wondering what the best KPIs are for your monthly marketing reports?
Welcome to the final post in our 3 part series on daily, weekly, and monthly marketing reports. In the first 2 articles, we covered what KPIs you should be tracking in daily and weekly reports.
If you haven’t read those yet, you can find them by clicking on the links below:
Today, we’ll be looking at monthly marketing reports and what metrics you should consider adding to them.
As always, though, your marketing reports will be 100% unique to your business and your goals. Keep in mind that the KPIs listed in this post are suggestions, not rules written in stone.
Before we get started though, let’s get clear on what monthly marketing reports are and why they matter.
What Are Monthly Marketing Reports?
Monthly marketing reports are one of the most useful reports for digital marketing teams. They are spaced to give you strategic insight into your marketing activities.
Your monthly reports should give an overview of all your different digital marketing activities and how they are performing. You’ll want to include a range of KPIs that indicate whether you are on track to meet your goals, highlight particularly successful campaigns, and flag any areas for concern.
As every marketer knows, it takes time for some forms of digital marketing to show results. SEO and social media marketing are especially like marathons rather than sprints.
While you’ll want to keep an eye on some of these KPIs in your daily and weekly reports too, your monthly reports give you a way of tracking longer-term trends. And it’s these trends that will inform your wider marketing and content creation strategy.
Many clients and senior managers want to see monthly reports from you, as well. It’s an ideal time to demonstrate your progress and how your campaigns are helping the company reach its goals.
Your monthly reports will often sit alongside information from other teams to help company leaders get an overall idea of how the business is doing. So, you should focus on KPIs that have strategic importance.
Ideally, monthly marketing reports should also be visual and easy to understand at a glance. Don’t forget that you’ll be sharing them with non-marketers, so you want to represent your KPIs in a way that is clear to someone with less experience of the nitty-gritty of digital marketing than you.
Busy clients or senior managers will likely have a lot of reports to wade through each month. The easier you can make it for them to understand yours and compare data with previous months, the better.
Now that we’ve taken a look at what monthly marketing reports are, let’s check out which KPIs you’ll want to add to them.
KPIs for Your Monthly Marketing Reports
Because your monthly reports are often useful to more than just your own team, you want to be a little more detailed than you might be in your more frequent weekly or daily reports.
But you also don’t want to overwhelm people with irrelevant data. Finding the sweet spot between too little information and too much is the tricky part.
When choosing which KPIs to include in your monthly reports, ask yourself if they will help you build a comprehensive view of your digital marketing activities. If a metric doesn’t relate to your company’s strategic goals and doesn’t give you genuinely actionable insights, don’t include it.
In this post, we’ll break down the KPIs to include in your monthly report by the following categories:
Ad spend
Brand awareness
Performance by platform
SEO
Let’s get started.
1) Ad Spend
Whether your reports are being shared with clients or with other teams within the same company, one question that everyone wants an answer to is: "how much have we spent, and was it worth it?".
KPIs that help you monitor your return on ad spend (ROAS) should be front and center in your monthly marketing reports.
For some of these, you may need to work with the sales team to track how leads generated by your campaigns perform. But many are available via Google Ads, Google Analytics, or the various social media platforms.
Here are the most common KPIs to track your ROAS:
Total ad spend
Ad spend per campaign
Cost-per-click
Cost-per-conversion
Conversion rate, broken down by campaign and by platform
Revenue generated by each campaign and platform (this is where you might need input from your sales team)
Out of all of these, the most important tend to be:
Cost-per-conversion
Revenue generated
At the end of the day, these tell you how much it costs to get a conversion and whether or not you’re making more than you spend.
2) Brand Awareness
Everyone likes to see that the money is moving in the right direction. But your company or clients are also aware of the value of building brand awareness.
Although it’s a harder thing to put a monetary figure against, the more people who know about your business and what you do, the more potential future customers you have.
So, you’ll want to monitor KPIs that show you’re successfully building your audience and reaching new people.
Because there are many KPIs you can track to monitor your brand awareness, I’ve broken this down into different categories.
You are looking for metrics that show roughly how many people your content has reached and whether they engaged with it. Here are the KPIs broken down by the most popular categories:
Social media engagement:
Follower growth rate
Reach (or impressions, where reach is unavailable)
Engagement rate
Click-through-rate
Email marketing
List growth rate
New subscribers
Unsubscribe rate
Open rate
Click-through-rate
PPC
Reach
Share of impressions
Click-through-rate
Website traffic
Total sessions
Unique visitors
New visitors
These KPIs are the most commonly used in each category they’re under. This is the perfect example of why you need to select the right KPIs for your goals specifically.
Some companies may focus more on social media than they do on paid ads. As such, they’d want to track things like follower growth rate and reach and would have no need for click-through rates from ads.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there is no cookie-cutter approach to building your reports (daily, weekly, or monthly).
3) Marketing Performance by Platform
Once you’ve looked into your budget and your brand awareness, you’ll want to start thinking about planning for the future. And that means you need to know what worked, what didn’t, and which platforms are sending the most potential customers your way.
Comparing results for different platforms and campaigns can give you vital insights that will help you plan your next move. And it’s useful information for the rest of the company (or your clients) to have, too.
If your sales team can see that they’re getting lots of leads from a particular source, they can adapt their sales approach to fit the content you share on that platform.
Assuming that your main goal is to drive people through to your website, there are several useful KPIs you can track to help you uncover your most successful marketing activities:
Website traffic source and medium
Sessions/users by campaign
Goal conversion rate by campaign or source
Bounce rate by channel
Most popular landing pages
Most popular blog posts
You might also monitor your click-through-rate for both organic and paid content on your various marketing channels. You can compare this to see which platform gives you the most engaged audience.
Out of all the KPIs listed above, I’m a big fan of tracking popular blog posts for content marketers. This will be a great indicator of what your target audience loves so you can plan to create more content around that topic.
4) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Finally, your monthly reports are an ideal place to look at how well your SEO efforts are working for you. As we’ve already discussed, SEO requires a long-term investment before it starts to show results.
That said, comparing stats from month to month will help you see if things are moving in the right direction.
Organic searches are still one of the most effective ways to drive potential customers to your website. So, you’ll want to know whether your strategy is working.
SEO KPIs might be something that you only include in your own team’s reports, or that you build a separate report around, as it can be difficult to neatly summarise in a visually appealing chart.
If you do take that approach, consider highlighting the percentage of your website traffic coming from organic searches in your general report as a quick indicator of SEO performance.
Other than traffic from organic searches, KPIs that help you monitor your SEO efforts include:
Organic traffic by landing page
Bounce rate for organic traffic
Conversion rate from organic traffic
Most popular search queries
Click-through-rate by search query
Average position on the page for popular search queries
These are all KPIs that you can get from free Google tools like Google Analytics.
I mention this because many people think you need expensive tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to track your SEO progress.
While these definitely help track keywords and your competitor’s content strategy, you can get a lot of mileage from Google’s free tools.
This is especially important for smaller businesses just starting out who don’t have a huge budget for expensive SEO tools.
Building Your Monthly Marketing Reports
Lastly, you need to know how to compile all the data into a single monthly report for your team or clients. For that, you have 2 options.
First, you can compile all the data manually in something like a Google spreadsheet. But this often leads to unnecessary errors in the data.
Or it requires you to pay somebody to put it in by hand. If you’re building lots of reports, this isn’t just time-consuming; it’s also expensive.
Your second option is using a report builder like Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is one of your best bets for building automated monthly marketing reports. It has a drag and drop builder which means you don’t need to be ‘tech-savvy’ to get started.
In fact, you can build reports from all of your favorite marketing channels in a matter of minutes. When they’re ready, you simply select the recipient and decide when you want to send these reports.
From there, they’ll be automatically sent straight to your recipients’ inbox.
That last part is important. That’s because many marketing report builders only allow you to share reports with a PDF attachment or through a 3rd-party URL.
Both of these options add friction to the report-sharing process that, frankly, I never saw the point to. That’s exactly why I built Metrics Watch: to get people the data they need in a format they already know.
It’s one of the reasons why the German stock trading company, onvista, chose Metrics Watch over 20 other tools.
And that’s it! These have been the most popular KPIs to include in your monthly marketing reports.
I hope you found this post helpful. If you did, you might also want to check out the following resources:
These articles will have everything you need to create better marketing reports to get a better ROI from your marketing strategy.
Want to see Metrics Watch in action for yourself? Just click below to start your 100% FREE 14-day trial (no credit card required):
Are you wondering what the best KPIs are for your monthly marketing reports?
Welcome to the final post in our 3 part series on daily, weekly, and monthly marketing reports. In the first 2 articles, we covered what KPIs you should be tracking in daily and weekly reports.
If you haven’t read those yet, you can find them by clicking on the links below:
Today, we’ll be looking at monthly marketing reports and what metrics you should consider adding to them.
As always, though, your marketing reports will be 100% unique to your business and your goals. Keep in mind that the KPIs listed in this post are suggestions, not rules written in stone.
Before we get started though, let’s get clear on what monthly marketing reports are and why they matter.
What Are Monthly Marketing Reports?
Monthly marketing reports are one of the most useful reports for digital marketing teams. They are spaced to give you strategic insight into your marketing activities.
Your monthly reports should give an overview of all your different digital marketing activities and how they are performing. You’ll want to include a range of KPIs that indicate whether you are on track to meet your goals, highlight particularly successful campaigns, and flag any areas for concern.
As every marketer knows, it takes time for some forms of digital marketing to show results. SEO and social media marketing are especially like marathons rather than sprints.
While you’ll want to keep an eye on some of these KPIs in your daily and weekly reports too, your monthly reports give you a way of tracking longer-term trends. And it’s these trends that will inform your wider marketing and content creation strategy.
Many clients and senior managers want to see monthly reports from you, as well. It’s an ideal time to demonstrate your progress and how your campaigns are helping the company reach its goals.
Your monthly reports will often sit alongside information from other teams to help company leaders get an overall idea of how the business is doing. So, you should focus on KPIs that have strategic importance.
Ideally, monthly marketing reports should also be visual and easy to understand at a glance. Don’t forget that you’ll be sharing them with non-marketers, so you want to represent your KPIs in a way that is clear to someone with less experience of the nitty-gritty of digital marketing than you.
Busy clients or senior managers will likely have a lot of reports to wade through each month. The easier you can make it for them to understand yours and compare data with previous months, the better.
Now that we’ve taken a look at what monthly marketing reports are, let’s check out which KPIs you’ll want to add to them.
KPIs for Your Monthly Marketing Reports
Because your monthly reports are often useful to more than just your own team, you want to be a little more detailed than you might be in your more frequent weekly or daily reports.
But you also don’t want to overwhelm people with irrelevant data. Finding the sweet spot between too little information and too much is the tricky part.
When choosing which KPIs to include in your monthly reports, ask yourself if they will help you build a comprehensive view of your digital marketing activities. If a metric doesn’t relate to your company’s strategic goals and doesn’t give you genuinely actionable insights, don’t include it.
In this post, we’ll break down the KPIs to include in your monthly report by the following categories:
Ad spend
Brand awareness
Performance by platform
SEO
Let’s get started.
1) Ad Spend
Whether your reports are being shared with clients or with other teams within the same company, one question that everyone wants an answer to is: "how much have we spent, and was it worth it?".
KPIs that help you monitor your return on ad spend (ROAS) should be front and center in your monthly marketing reports.
For some of these, you may need to work with the sales team to track how leads generated by your campaigns perform. But many are available via Google Ads, Google Analytics, or the various social media platforms.
Here are the most common KPIs to track your ROAS:
Total ad spend
Ad spend per campaign
Cost-per-click
Cost-per-conversion
Conversion rate, broken down by campaign and by platform
Revenue generated by each campaign and platform (this is where you might need input from your sales team)
Out of all of these, the most important tend to be:
Cost-per-conversion
Revenue generated
At the end of the day, these tell you how much it costs to get a conversion and whether or not you’re making more than you spend.
2) Brand Awareness
Everyone likes to see that the money is moving in the right direction. But your company or clients are also aware of the value of building brand awareness.
Although it’s a harder thing to put a monetary figure against, the more people who know about your business and what you do, the more potential future customers you have.
So, you’ll want to monitor KPIs that show you’re successfully building your audience and reaching new people.
Because there are many KPIs you can track to monitor your brand awareness, I’ve broken this down into different categories.
You are looking for metrics that show roughly how many people your content has reached and whether they engaged with it. Here are the KPIs broken down by the most popular categories:
Social media engagement:
Follower growth rate
Reach (or impressions, where reach is unavailable)
Engagement rate
Click-through-rate
Email marketing
List growth rate
New subscribers
Unsubscribe rate
Open rate
Click-through-rate
PPC
Reach
Share of impressions
Click-through-rate
Website traffic
Total sessions
Unique visitors
New visitors
These KPIs are the most commonly used in each category they’re under. This is the perfect example of why you need to select the right KPIs for your goals specifically.
Some companies may focus more on social media than they do on paid ads. As such, they’d want to track things like follower growth rate and reach and would have no need for click-through rates from ads.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there is no cookie-cutter approach to building your reports (daily, weekly, or monthly).
3) Marketing Performance by Platform
Once you’ve looked into your budget and your brand awareness, you’ll want to start thinking about planning for the future. And that means you need to know what worked, what didn’t, and which platforms are sending the most potential customers your way.
Comparing results for different platforms and campaigns can give you vital insights that will help you plan your next move. And it’s useful information for the rest of the company (or your clients) to have, too.
If your sales team can see that they’re getting lots of leads from a particular source, they can adapt their sales approach to fit the content you share on that platform.
Assuming that your main goal is to drive people through to your website, there are several useful KPIs you can track to help you uncover your most successful marketing activities:
Website traffic source and medium
Sessions/users by campaign
Goal conversion rate by campaign or source
Bounce rate by channel
Most popular landing pages
Most popular blog posts
You might also monitor your click-through-rate for both organic and paid content on your various marketing channels. You can compare this to see which platform gives you the most engaged audience.
Out of all the KPIs listed above, I’m a big fan of tracking popular blog posts for content marketers. This will be a great indicator of what your target audience loves so you can plan to create more content around that topic.
4) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Finally, your monthly reports are an ideal place to look at how well your SEO efforts are working for you. As we’ve already discussed, SEO requires a long-term investment before it starts to show results.
That said, comparing stats from month to month will help you see if things are moving in the right direction.
Organic searches are still one of the most effective ways to drive potential customers to your website. So, you’ll want to know whether your strategy is working.
SEO KPIs might be something that you only include in your own team’s reports, or that you build a separate report around, as it can be difficult to neatly summarise in a visually appealing chart.
If you do take that approach, consider highlighting the percentage of your website traffic coming from organic searches in your general report as a quick indicator of SEO performance.
Other than traffic from organic searches, KPIs that help you monitor your SEO efforts include:
Organic traffic by landing page
Bounce rate for organic traffic
Conversion rate from organic traffic
Most popular search queries
Click-through-rate by search query
Average position on the page for popular search queries
These are all KPIs that you can get from free Google tools like Google Analytics.
I mention this because many people think you need expensive tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to track your SEO progress.
While these definitely help track keywords and your competitor’s content strategy, you can get a lot of mileage from Google’s free tools.
This is especially important for smaller businesses just starting out who don’t have a huge budget for expensive SEO tools.
Building Your Monthly Marketing Reports
Lastly, you need to know how to compile all the data into a single monthly report for your team or clients. For that, you have 2 options.
First, you can compile all the data manually in something like a Google spreadsheet. But this often leads to unnecessary errors in the data.
Or it requires you to pay somebody to put it in by hand. If you’re building lots of reports, this isn’t just time-consuming; it’s also expensive.
Your second option is using a report builder like Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is one of your best bets for building automated monthly marketing reports. It has a drag and drop builder which means you don’t need to be ‘tech-savvy’ to get started.
In fact, you can build reports from all of your favorite marketing channels in a matter of minutes. When they’re ready, you simply select the recipient and decide when you want to send these reports.
From there, they’ll be automatically sent straight to your recipients’ inbox.
That last part is important. That’s because many marketing report builders only allow you to share reports with a PDF attachment or through a 3rd-party URL.
Both of these options add friction to the report-sharing process that, frankly, I never saw the point to. That’s exactly why I built Metrics Watch: to get people the data they need in a format they already know.
It’s one of the reasons why the German stock trading company, onvista, chose Metrics Watch over 20 other tools.
And that’s it! These have been the most popular KPIs to include in your monthly marketing reports.
I hope you found this post helpful. If you did, you might also want to check out the following resources:
These articles will have everything you need to create better marketing reports to get a better ROI from your marketing strategy.
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