You’ve spent countless hours crafting your perfect product listing and optimized piece of content, and you’ve followed every guide to the T to gain maximum impressions and traffic from your online marketing efforts. You’ve even implemented A/B testing to determine which versions perform best and focused on growing your organic search traffic. Finally, you’ve attained what you consider to be perfect online marketing performance, and you’re thrilled to see all your hard work pay off.

What happens next?

You might consider that you’re finally done, but it’s not yet the end. Yes, you’ve obtained all the metrics you need to evaluate the success of your campaign, but what happens when you want to improve your performance again?

Luckily, you can take a step back and look at your overall performance from a different perspective. By creating an online marketing report, you can break down the key performance indicators for a clear view of how you’re doing and where you can improve. What’s more, you can track the performance of various campaigns and adjust your strategy according to the results. In this article, we’ll discuss how to create an overall online marketing report for your business.

Report Format

The first thing you should consider is the format of your report. You could simply print out the report in hard copy, but that wouldn’t do you any good if you want to follow up with a detailed analysis. You should consider investing in a PDF reader that allows you to interact with your documents. This way, you can highlight and mark up certain parts of the report while still having the ability to follow the narrative flow and grasp the key takeaways at a glance. You should also create a mailing list for your report. Not only will this allow you to follow up with interested parties with more details, but you can also use it to send periodic updates on your report’s progress. Ultimately, you should consider creating a summary slide deck for your report. This way, you can quickly bring together all the key takeaways in a concise format that will help you follow what you need to during your day-to-day analysis.

Objective

The next step is to set your report’s objective. What do you hope to learn from the report? Are you looking to better understand your current market position? Are you hoping to discover insights that will allow you to become more influential in your industry? Set yourself up for success by clearly stating your objectives and expectations before you get started. Believe it or not, the most successful online marketers I’ve met have all had very clear objectives in mind when crafting their reports. Setting the right objectives will also help you track the success of your campaign and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you’re looking to expand your reach into a new geographic area or gain more leads within your industry, you might consider ramping up your social media campaigns or setting up a simple Google ad campaign.

Analysis

Next up is your analysis. As part of your objective, you should consider analyzing the key performance indicators that will allow you to evaluate the success of your campaign. In this part of your report, you’ll want to take a step back and look at the results of your work from a different perspective. In my experience, businesses that undertake an in-depth analysis of their performance tend to fare much better than those who don’t. One of the best overall tools for analyzing the success of your online marketing campaign is Google Analytics. As a data-driven company, Google makes excellent reporting tools available to public agencies and businesses. With Google Analytics, you can track every aspect of your website’s performance and drill down into the results to get an in-depth look at what’s going on. In this part of your report, you’ll want to consider taking full advantage of all the information that Google Analytics has to offer. If you’re newer to digital marketing, take time to learn the ropes of this program. With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to fully understand what’s going on with your website and what changes you need to make to improve your performance.

Recommendations

Now for the fun part. Here, you have the opportunity to put into practice all your new-found knowledge and detail the action items you’ve identified as part of your analysis. As a business owner, CEO, or senior leader, this is one part of your report that you’ll want to look at closely. You might consider making a few key recommendations based on what you’ve learned. For example, maybe you discovered that your product listings are not as effective as you previously thought. In that case, you could consider suggesting a rebranding effort or even an overhaul of your product listings. Or, perhaps you’ve noticed that your email marketing is currently underperforming and you could propose an email marketing improvement plan. Finally, you could suggest a digital marketing audit to pinpoint a host of issues that could be addressed with a fresh set of eyes and rigorous analysis.

Regardless of whether you’re a seasoned marketing professional or a beginner who’s just getting started, creating an overall marketing report will prove to be a valuable asset. By taking the time to track your performance over several different platforms, you’ll be able to clearly see at a glance how your online efforts are producing results and identify the areas where you can improve. Creating an overall marketing report will also allow you to benchmark your performance against previous campaigns and discover the improvements you’ve made.