Why Digital Marketing Reports are Essential for Your Business
In today’s data-driven landscape, digital marketing reports are one of your most powerful tools, helping you transform numbers into insight, guiding strategy, and fostering transparency. Here is why every business, regardless of size, should be assessing how their digital efforts are performing.
Making Data-Informed Decisions
Marketing analytics reveal what efforts are truly working or not working, helping decision makers to understand big-picture trends and forecast future results. This eliminates the guesswork and helps you to improve your customer experience. If your business has not been intentional about digital marketing reports to date, this can be a helpful refresher on what these reports can provide your team.
Benchmark + Track Long-Term Progress
First and foremost, consistent reporting enables you to plan out your marketing strategies and budgets for years to come by providing a benchmark for performance. At the very basic level, your website should be getting more (valuable) traffic YoY, but if you don’t have or aren’t paying attention to this data, you are essentially flying blind. Having the necessary tools set up will allow you to easily assess how much traffic you are receiving, where it is from, and what that traffic is doing. We have encountered businesses of all sizes that do not have this foundational piece in place. In those situations, you have to start with MoM analysis as data is difficult to backdate, but you have to start somewhere! Beyond simply measuring how many people are coming to your site, this benchmark will help you to measure the results of new content, email pushes, social media posts, etc. so that you can build a better marketing strategy around what resonates with your audience.
Assess Individual Marketing Channels
If you are utilizing multiple marketing channels (as you should), it is important to understand how each channel is performing for you. Are more potential customers coming from organic (SEO) traffic, but your social media visitors are actually converting better? This level of insight can help you to determine where your marketing dollars and efforts are best spent. Drilling down to the granular channel level can also help you understand what areas of your site are getting the most attention and if there are pages that should be getting more exposure. This tells you that maybe those pages need to be reworked or highlighted in a different way to ensure the most important information is being seen (more on this below).
Setting up custom events within Google Analytics is going to greatly help you determine which traffic source is most valuable to your business because value comes from conversions, not just site visits. As mentioned above, if you have a lot of traffic coming from a specific source but they are not engaging or converting, then maybe there is a disconnect between what that source expected and what they received. If this is happening, it is a great time to look over that channel’s strategy to see how that can be better aligned.
Support Content Strategy
In addition to getting into how individual marketing channels are performing, reporting also reveals what content is working hardest for you and what resonates most with your audience. By measuring the performance of individual pieces of content, you can get a better indication of what type of content your audience is looking for and in what format, helping you to build out your editorial calendar and determine which pieces could be restructured for better future performance. Combining this with the assessment of your individual marketing channels you can determine whether certain content resonates better in one channel over another.
We also use these reports to see what next step visitors are taking after they land on your site. We don’t just care about site visits; we care more about what actions they are taking on your site. For example, getting a lot of traffic to a piece of content is nice, but if they are not buying, reaching out, or even subscribing to your newsletter, then maybe that piece of content was not relevant to your actual target audience.
Communicate with Key Stakeholders
Whether you are the stakeholder or you report to a stakeholder, questions have to be answered and reporting helps answer those questions as well as anticipate future questions and solutions. Your intuition can tell you a lot, but it can’t justify a bigger marketing budget. Being able to communicate effectively on how efforts are supporting organizational KPIs is essential in justifying and approving marketing spend and efforts as well as helping you determine what that marketing budget should be. Chances are you know what the KPIs for your business are, but you need to support that information with data in these analytics tools. Even when things are going exceptionally well, you need to understand the reason why in order for it to be sustained.
Getting Started with Digital Marketing Reports
If all of this sounds good to you, you may be asking yourself, “How am I supposed to get started?” Before you dive into the world of reporting, you have to set up your analytics accounts correctly. Google offers free analytics tools, but they must be set up individually (see the links below). Once you have these tools set up, you can track site performance within the platforms or utilize a 3rd party tool, such as Google Looker Studio, to create a one-stop shop for your reporting and measurement needs.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is offered for free, and after a little bit of script installation, you can begin measuring who comes to your site and what they are doing once they get there. The latest iteration of Google Analytics is called GA4, and while it is the most robust version of Google Analytics, it isn’t as easy to navigate if you are unfamiliar, making a tool like Google Looker Studio even more beneficial. We always set up (or assess an existing setup) GA for our clients and ensure that they own the account, ensuring they own their data. It is important to note that GA will only track data from the point it is installed moving forward, nothing retroactive.
Google Search Console
We always tell clients that there are 2 ways to get your website discovered - you create a website and wait for people to find it OR you can create a Google Search Console (GSC) account and submit your sitemap so Google can begin indexing your site. We always choose option 2! Aside from indexing your site, GSC will also inform you if there are any indexing issues with your site, like broken links or 404 errors. GSC also helps you to understand how and when your website is showing up in search results. Once you set these tools up, you can connect it to your GA account for integrated data.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools works very similarly to GSC, but specific to Bing. You can even use your GSC account to set up your Bing Webmaster Tools account. While this cannot be connected to GA, it is still helpful to ensure exposure on additional search engines.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager (GTM) has many uses, but for reporting purposes, it makes setting up custom events that can be connected to GA simple (see examples below). GTM can be daunting to some, so for most of our clients, we set this up completely while still ensuring they own the account and have access to the data.
Example Events:
Testing out different CTA languages
Clicking on a special offer that is only in certain sections of the site
External Link Clicks
Newsletter Signups
and more!
Optional: Hotjar
The last analytics tool that we traditionally set up for our clients is HotJar, which is a heatmapping software that allows you to visually understand how visitors are navigating your site (i.e. how far they are scrolling and what areas are getting more attention). We like to use HotJar before a site redesign or when we initially kick off a project so we can offer some CRO insights, but it can be a helpful tool for any website. HotJar has a free option, which works perfectly well, but if you want data quicker and more functionalities, there are paid plans as well.
TL;DR
Digital marketing reports aren’t optional - they are essential! They convert raw data into understanding, revealing trends, justifying budgets, and driving decision-making that converts. If you are overwhelmed by the idea of monitoring each of these analytics tools for individual reports, we are happy to help you set up a custom, easy-to-understand report to help you measure what is most important to your business.