Are you looking for the right KPIs to include in your quarterly marketing reports?
Creating reports for your team or clients is crucial to optimizing your marketing strategy. It refocuses your efforts on the KPIs that matter the most to your company’s success.
As such, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of your marketing campaigns at all times. While this usually means daily, weekly, or monthly reports, you’ll also want quarterly overviews to keep people “in the know.”
That’s why, in today’s post, we’re going to look at what KPIs you’ll likely want to include in your quarterly reports.
Before we dive into that, though, let’s get clear on what quarterly reports are and why they’re so important to your long-term success.
What Quarterly Reports Are (& Why They Matter)
If you are already running monthly, weekly, or even daily reports, your heart might be sinking at the thought of yet another marketing report.
Afterall, why on earth do you need a quarterly report on top of everything else?
It’s all about the questions you are trying to answer. Reporting shouldn’t be done just for the sake of it. Each of your reports should be formulated to answer a set of specific questions about your marketing performance.
Daily and weekly reports track your everyday marketing. They are a quick way of checking on what is going on and making sure there are no issues that need your attention. They also alert you to short-term changes in your audience and engagement.
Monthly reports are more involved. They’ll usually be shared beyond your immediate team and are used to monitor your medium-term marketing trends. They help you track the performance of individual campaigns.
But your quarterly reports are a different beast entirely. These aren’t about immediate insights. Your quarterly report is an in-depth strategic document that should be used to plan your long-term marketing approach.
Those small dips and peaks that show up in your monthly and weekly reports won’t appear in quarterly reports. What you’ll see instead is the overall trends in your reach, conversion rate, and ROI that give you the evidence you need to plan your next quarter and beyond.
Quarterly reports are almost always shared outside your team, usually with senior management or your clients’ decision-makers. That means they need to give enough information to be used for strategic planning, but also must be readily understandable by people whose background isn’t in marketing.
With that in mind, let’s turn to some of the main KPIs you’ll likely want to track in your quarterly marketing reports.
KPIs for Your Quarterly Marketing Reports
Deciding which KPIs to include in your quarterly marketing reports requires you to understand what questions matter to those who will see the reports.
What will help you demonstrate the long-term trends, showcase your impact, and give you the insights you need to plan for the future?
Typically, companies are most concerned with two aspects. First, the bottom line. What has your marketing cost you? And what revenue have you brought in as a result?
Second, brand awareness. How has your marketing helped you reach new audiences, and are those audiences responding well to your content?
Of course, you shouldn’t make assumptions.
When you first set up your quarterly reporting templates, it’s best to speak to those who will see them and check what they want to be included. What is important to the finance team is not necessarily what is important to the sales team, and vice versa.
Ideally, you’ll create one comprehensive report that brings everyone’s concerns together. Quarterly reports are all about the big picture, so you don’t want to generate different versions for each team in the way you might for your monthly or weekly reports.
Don’t forget to add comments, summaries, and suggestions to help your readers make sense of the data. You might also want a highlights section that details any particularly successful campaigns and key learning points.
Assuming you are like most other companies, KPIs that help you monitor revenue and brand awareness will be your first port of call. So we’ve broken down possible metrics to include into those two categories.
1) Revenue
A business that doesn’t bring in enough cash won’t last very long. Keeping a close eye on how your marketing impacts your bottom line is a crucial part of your quarterly reporting.
Choose KPIs that will help you track the ROI from every marketing channel and campaign. When it comes to putting together your future marketing strategy, you need this information to get the most from your budget.
Here are some examples of metrics that will give you vital insight into your best sources of revenue:
Revenue Generated:
How much money your company has made is obviously an important metric. But you are specifically interested in how revenue is affected by your marketing campaigns. So you’ll want to break down the total figure for the quarter in a few different ways:
- By audience segment
- By source/medium
- By campaign
- By landing page
- By new vs returning visitors
Lifetime Value:
Getting a new customer on board is one thing. Keeping them is quite another. But loyal customers are worth the money you spend in attracting them in the first place. So, the lifetime value (LTV) is an important metric to include in your quarterly reports.
Like your revenue figures, your LTV gives you the most insights if you break it down by different audience segments. Do those who come to you via social media have a higher lifetime value than those who find you via organic search? How does being subscribed to your email newsletter affect the LTV of customers?
You can also break LTV down by demographic information to see which groups you should target in your next marketing campaign.
Return on Investment (ROI)
As you know, , marketing costs money. Channels that bring in plenty of revenue but also cost a lot of money may end up not being as valuable to you as those that bring in less revenue for a smaller cost. Your quarterly report should include an analysis of the ROI from different platforms and campaigns, so you can manage your spend.
For each marketing channel and campaign, include metrics such as:
- Cost-per-conversion
- Cost-per-click
- Ad spend (if applicable)
The goal is to keep these KPIs limited to answer the following questions: are these marketing campaigns bringing in more money than their costing.
If yes, then everything is on track.
If not, then you’ll have to answer a different question: are these KPIs building our brand awareness that lead to future sales?
That brings us to our next point.
2) Brand Awareness
Your brand’s reach and reputation may not be as vital as your cash flow, but they are still important considerations. To guarantee your long-term success, you need to reach new customers and retain your old ones. That’s why brand awareness is the second focus of most quarterly reports.
Exactly which metrics you include here will depend on which marketing channels you are using. For most companies, it will include social media, email marketing, and a website at the very least. You will likely also be using PPC advertising and SEO to drive awareness through Google or other search engines.
KPIs we recommend including for each of these are:
Social Media
- Follower growth rate
- Reach (both paid and organic)
- Engagement rate
- Click-through rate
Email Marketing
- List growth rate
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Unsubscribe rate
Website
- Total sessions and unique users
- New vs returning visitors
- Most popular pages
- Bounce rate
- Users and sessions by source
PPC
- Reach
- Share of impressions
- Click-through rate
SEO
- Most popular search queries
- Click-through-rate by search query
- Average position on the page for popular search queries
Don’t forget that you are looking to give an overview here, or your reports will become unmanageably long very quickly.
You will likely want to aggregate your data instead of reporting on each campaign the way you do for revenue. This section is less about individual campaigns and more about evaluating how quickly your audience is growing and which channels are performing best to boost brand awareness.
But that begs the question: how do you create quarterly marketing reports with all these KPIs and without losing too much of your valuable time?
The BEST Way to Make Quarterly Marketing Reports
While you can certainly create your quarterly marketing reports by hand, this tends to come with a few problems.
First, it’s a time-consuming process. That means you might save money on the frontend, but lose more money (through your or your team’s time) on the backend.
Remember, if a single report takes 1 hour to compile, then it costs your hourly rate.
Second, manually creating these reports leaves you vulnerable to human error. Pouring over spreadsheets can be a mind-numbing experience (especially for creative types like marketers).
As a result, many reports I’ve seen have small errors that lead to big consequences.
For the most reliable quarterly marketing reports, you’d be much better off using a tool like Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is one of the best report building tools on the market. That’s because it uses a codeless drag and drop visual report builder. Plus, it connects with your favorite marketing channels, such as:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Ads
- Facebook (paid and organic)
- Instagram (paid and organic)
- LinkedIn (paid and organic)
- Mailchimp
This allows you to collect data from multiple sources to build a comprehensive report for your team or clients.
But the best part is the way Metrics Watch shares this data.
Unlike most report builders, Metrics Watch sends your reports directly via email. That means no more messy PDFs to organize, and no more 3rd-party report dashboards to manage logins and passwords.
Instead, simply select who needs the report and when. Then send it automatically straight to the recipients’ inbox.
Metrics Watch truly is the report building tool with the least amount of friction when it comes to sharing KPIs from your quarterly reports.
Want to see it in action for yourself? Click below to start your 100% risk-free Metrics Watch trial today (no credit card required):
Start Your Free Trial Today!And that’s all for now! These have been the most likely KPIs you’ll want to include in your marketing reports.
If you enjoyed this post, then you’ll likely want to check out the following resources:
These articles will have even more information on how you can create more profitable marketing reports that are backed by data.