What Are Marketing Reports?

Marketing reports are static, data-focused documents that summarize key aspects of a business’s marketing performance at regular intervals. 

Here’s a peek at an example created with Semrush’s My Reports tool:

Marketing report shows charts for impressions, cost, clicks, and conversions by day for ad campaigns

Marketing reports usually include metrics related to:

  • Reach: The number of people exposed to marketing efforts (e.g., ad impressions)
  • Engagement: Positive interactions with your efforts (e.g., social media likes)
  • Conversion: Desirable actions resulting from your efforts (e.g. purchases)
  • Return on investment (ROI): A measure of profits as related to costs

They can provide an overview of multiple campaigns and channels or focus on one in particular. The right approach depends on your marketing strategy and resources.

Why Are Marketing Reports Important?

Marketing reports are important because they provide a clear, shared, and comprehensive overview of marketing performance. 

This helps you get buy-in from internal stakeholders and clients. 

After all:

If you get good results but don’t communicate them, your success might not be recognized.

If you get poor results and don’t address them, you might lose your colleagues’ trust.

Reporting also empowers your team to make better decisions.

Rather than relying on guesswork and limited datasets, marketers can get a good understanding of what’s working and what isn’t. And adapt their future efforts accordingly.

Best Practices for Marketing Reporting

Follow these best practices when creating your marketing reports:

  • Be consistent. Reporting the same data types at regular intervals allows you to make useful comparisons. Take advantage of the marketing report templates and scheduling features available in My Reports.
  • Don’t overwhelm. While you want to keep stakeholders informed, it’s important not to overwhelm them. Focus on the most important data only and avoid reporting too frequently.
  • Address negative results. It may be tempting to exclude negative results, but this is counterproductive. Take the opportunity to learn and share an action plan.
  • Share insights. Provide your team with any useful context, conclusions, or ideas. It’s also helpful to write a short summary of each report.
  • Collect reliable data. Poor-quality data leads to poor-quality reports. Make sure to collect your data from trustworthy sources.

When your report is ready, present it to the stakeholders personally. So you can provide additional context and answer any questions.

5 Marketing Report Examples

We’ve created five different types of marketing report examples to inspire you.

SEO Marketing Report

Below is a snippet of an SEO marketing report created with My Reports. And data from various Semrush tools.

This section focuses on organic traffic in the previous month (how many unpaid visits the target website got from search engines). 

Comparisons against other time periods and traffic sources provide useful context.

This marketing report shows a summary of traffic analytics such as visits, unique visitors, bounce rate, and channel distribution.

For insight into traffic changes, readers can look at keyword rankings (where the website positions in search results).

The report shows how many rankings were lost, gained, improved, and declined.

This marketing report shows new vs lost organic keywords as well as improved vs declined keywords in a comparison graph

In SEO, end results like traffic and rankings can take time to show.

That’s why it’s helpful to include input-oriented metrics in your reports, too.

For instance, you can show how your team is progressing with tasks like building backlinks.

Backlinks section of SEO marketing report shows total backlinks, backlinks by type, and new and lost backlinks as charts

And fixing technical SEO issues. 

This site audit report shows total site score, number of crawled pages, errors, warnings, and notices

These metrics demonstrate that you’re laying the groundwork to achieve future results. 

This Google Ads marketing campaign report provides an overview of key monthly metrics, including:

  • Impressions: The number of ad views
  • Clicks: The number of ad clicks
  • Conversions: The number of conversions (e.g., purchases) resulting from ad clicks
  • CTR: The percentage of impressions that generated clicks
  • Cost: The amount spent on advertising (in your chosen currency)
  • CPC: Cost per click. Which represents cost divided by clicks. 
  • Cost / conv.: Cost per conversion. Which represents cost divided by conversions.
  • Conversions Rate: The percentage of impressions that generated conversions 
This Google Ads overview report shows metrics and their change over time

Additional charts show how impressions, costs, clicks, and conversions fluctuated each day:

Google Ads marketing report shows charts for impressions, cost, clicks, and conversions by day for ad campaigns

Further down, there’s a breakdown of metrics by ad campaign.

This allows readers to learn from the highest-performing campaigns. And identify ads that require improvement.

table shows metrics per ad campaign for an easy comparison

Email Marketing Report

The email marketing report below features high-level metrics for emails sent in the previous month.

Data comes from the business’s email marketing platform—in this case, it’s Mailchimp.

  • Opens Total: How many emails were opened
  • Open Rate: The percentage of sent emails that were opened
  • Clicks: How many times your email links were clicked 
  • Unsubscribed: The percentage of recipients who unsubscribed from your list

Readers can also see the month-to-month changes in these figures. And assess whether performance is improving at a desirable rate.

email marketing report overview shows metrics and their change over time

If you send multiple types of emails, provide segmented data for each one. 

Like this:

table lists metrics by email campaign for easy comparison

That way, you can identify strengths and weaknesses in particular areas. And act on them.

Local SEO Marketing Report 

Our local SEO marketing report example features data from Google Business Profile.

It shows how many times the target profile was viewed in Google Search and Maps. And what kinds of actions these impressions generated.

Local SEO marketing report shows Google Business Profile data related to impressions and actions

To better understand where these impressions come from, readers can look at heatmaps from the Map Rank Tracker. Which show where the profile ranks for target keywords in nearby search locations.

heatmaps show how a business profile appears in Google Maps for a keyword, compared to other businesses

The report also shows the team’s progress with securing local business listings.

listing management report shows listing statuses such as connected, unavailable, processing, and disconnected

Social Media Marketing Report 

This social media marketing report provides an overview of metrics across multiple accounts.

  • Audience: The number of followers (or an equivalent metric) as of the reporting date
  • Activity: The number of posts published over the chosen time period
  • Engagement: The number of likes, comments, etc., received over the chosen time period
This social media marketing report shows an overview of facebook and instagram metrics as well as their change over time

Readers can also view a breakdown of metrics by post. Which helps social media managers identify the best-performing content types and posting times.

This social report lists posts by total engagement for easy analysis

This marketing report format eliminates the need to view social analytics on various platforms.

Automate Your Marketing Reports

Semrush’s My Reports tool makes it quick and easy to create marketing reports.

Take advantage of the marketing report templates provided. Or build your own with our drag-and-drop editor. 

It allows you to:

  • Import data from multiple popular platforms
  • Choose from various themes and formatting options
  • Add your own branding and text
Semrush My Reports editor shows integrations with external marketing tools for analytics, SEO, paid advertising, lead tracking, and more

Once you’re done, schedule your report for every day, week, or month.

Then, set up automatic emails for your stakeholders. Or create a shareable link to an online dashboard.

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