The term “marketing” may bring to mind things like flashy ads, tradeshow swag, and pithy social media posts—and a team that’s always asking for more budget to do it all. But in reality, marketers make crucial daily decisions that impact the company. Metrics such as website traffic, lead volume, and customer retention are what back up marketing decisions that move the business forward. It’s about doing what’s right for the company, and like any team will find, reporting on data and results is how that’s done. 

Marketing reports will vary depending on the data you’re reviewing and the purpose of each report. You could be assessing where traffic and leads are coming from, the content they interacted with, whether or not they converted, even how long it took them to become a customer. In short, you’re gathering and analyzing marketing metrics that will inform your future decisions, strategies, and performance. These reports are what uncover the meaningful and actionable data so you can form conclusions and meet goals. 

Without this in-depth data, your team is flying blind, making decisions based on a “gut feeling” that may or may not be anywhere near accurate because there’s no information on what’s actually working and what’s not. You need marketing reports, and you need them accurate, and you need them now. 

KPIs You Probably Need to Be Tracking

Keeping a finger on the pulse of what’s working and what’s not for your marketing efforts requires monitoring specific key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some typical ones to make sure you’re covering in your reporting: 

• Awareness Metrics: The number of visitors (traffic) to your website. You may choose to break this down into organic traffic, direct traffic, unique visitors, and what other websites are sending traffic your way. 
• Conversion Rate: This usually refers to how many website visitors perform a desired reaction on your site, such as completing a form, signing up for a demo, or purchasing a product/service. 
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of acquiring new customers.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): How much revenue you can expect from an account or customer.
• Social Media Engagement: Clicks, shares, comments, reposts, followers, etc. This should cover all the interactions that occur on your organization’s social media profiles. 
• Email Open and Click-Through Rates: Of the emails you send, how many were opened and how many readers clicked a link in the message. 
• Return on Investment (ROI): A calculation of campaign performance and the impact of the strategy. This is best looked at month over month. 
• Bounce Rate: How many visitors leave your site after only looking at one page. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list of marketing KPIs you can report on, nor will all of these KPIs be relevant to your business or team. But it’s a good place to start for creating monthly marketing reports that prove your value and success to the organization and provide actionable insights to help determine where to go next, what to do more of, and where to redirect efforts. 

The Intersection of KPIs and Marketing Reports

Presenting these KPIs typically occurs in weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual marketing reports, which involve collecting, analyzing, and presenting data in a way that can intertwine with sales, service, and product development. This starts with aggregating data from all your various data sources. 

The most popular tool for aggregating, manipulating, analyzing, and presenting data is Microsoft Excel. We all love a spreadsheet, but we don’t love how static spreadsheets create roadblocks to effective reporting. The speed of business demands real-time analytics, which static spreadsheets simply cannot do. 

The con of running static monthly marketing reports include the fact that a month can be a long time. While it’s a good time period for collecting data to analyze, it’s also a long time in the lifespan of a campaign and other marketing efforts, which means you could experience delays in uncovering issues and pivoting to better opportunities. 

For those of us manually assembling these reports, the idea of pivoting to do this report weekly is, in a word, overwhelming. Static spreadsheet reports already take a long time to assemble. Once a month may already seem like too often based on the time it takes. More often, and your team may threaten mutiny. 

Which is where Excel integration comes in. 

Powering Marketing Reports with Excel Integration

Integrated spreadsheets have the power to remove the roadblocks from your monthly reporting by pulling data automatically from your data sources and feeding it directly into dynamic spreadsheets to update reports with to-the-moment data automatically on a regular schedule or any time on demand. This means that monthly marketing reports can be built into a “set it and forget it” format that updates at any frequency you like—monthly, weekly, or even daily! 

When it comes to building dynamic integrated spreadsheets for marketing reports, integration solutions like ExtendInsights that connect Microsoft Excel to popular data sources like NetSuite, HubSpot, Chargebee, Stripe, and Salesforce. ExtendInsights let you import data from multiple data sources, transform the data, then link the tables together for an even more complete picture of your marketing activities and results. You can stay in the familiar environment of Excel while driving opportunities through seamless integration with your marketing data sources. Everybody wins. Marketing most of all. 

Get your data sources integrated with Excel today with a free trial of ExtendInsights. Start here.