When a digital marketing agency works alongside clients, both sides should have clear, concise motives in mind. A company knows what their end goal looks like, and an agency understands how they want to get them there. Although both parties’ targets will look different, we know for sure that both should have an idea of their objective. Not sure what to look out for when reporting with a digital marketing agency? Zero Gravity Marketing (ZGM) has written it all out for you so your marketing strategy is as successful as possible.
Every company should have marketing goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which help measure success against goals. For example, eCommerce objectives would be to increase revenue and improve brand awareness and profit. As an agency, we would measure the KPIs of Gross Revenue, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and the number of digital impressions (both organic and paid).
When working with digital marketers, it’s important to clearly outline your goals and to request that your reports be delivered on time either weekly or monthly. It is crucial that they are also consistently reporting on the same performance indicators. Less reputable agencies may try to show you the statistics that work in their favor by telling you only the good news. At ZGM, we believe in 100% transparency. That means we will discuss the bad news, too, so we can quickly pivot. Our team wants complete alignment with our clients so that everyone understands the current results and what we are doing to improve them.
Every report should show how you’re doing both month over month (MOM) and year over year (YOY). They should include graphs that display monthly performance since the analytics were implemented. To see a chart of visits and conversions, or revenue if you’re an eCommerce company, will help you spot trends over a long period. Ask yourself, “Am I trending in the right direction? Am I hitting a real plateau? Am I meeting my goals?” Reports should also have a breakdown of results by medium. For example, Organic Search, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Paid Social, Email, etc.
It’s essential to see what is happening with your site visitors once they reach your website. Ask your agency to see the top landing pages, bounce and conversion rates, and visitor behavior reports. If you are running heatmap software like Hotjar, watch videos of your customer’s browsing behavior to identify issues with your user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).
If you’re interested in how you’re website is doing in Organic Search (and you should be!), you should ask your agency to include a monthly report of your search engine rankings and if you are improving down to a keyword level. It’s also beneficial for Organic Search to measure your search impressions over time through Google Search Console. Looking at your top rankings and keywords through Google Search Console, along with the best landing pages through Google Analytics, will help you determine where your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Marketing efforts are most valuable.
All paid media campaigns should have a measurement of the data being tracked. This will provide important information on how to move forward with your marketing strategy. Measurements that should be included are:
If you’re an eCommerce company, you will want to focus on the number of transactions and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). It’s very helpful to see a breakdown of the above metrics by campaign, ad group, keyword, or search term (in the case of paid search), and individual ad creative and messaging.
Make sure if you’re running ads on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you measure engagement. You will want to know what social content is resonating with and how your audience reacts to the content. Channels such as Facebook also report the number of individual people you’re reaching — another essential social media KPI. Is your goal to increase the number of people who follow your brand on these platforms? Ask to see a graph of the total number of page likes.
If your agency is sending email blasts or marketing automation emails to your customers, ensure that their reports contain information tracking your email efforts’ success. Data that should be measured are email sends, open rate, clicks, and other similar types of data regarding how visitors interact with your website after they click on the email. This information should include bounce rate and conversion rates, too.
The best reports from a digital marketing agency will pull in real-time data. ZGM uses Data Studio, a Google platform, to make custom marketing dashboards. This tool pulls data from sources including:
For our clients, we often use custom data sources by pulling in other data based upon unique needs.
The final aspect that every digital marketing report should have is a list of the work that’s been completed, any that needs approval, insights about the data, recommendations for moving forward, and the next steps that must be accomplished.
Having all of this data at your fingertips will help you, and your agency, quickly pivot. We believe the more data, the better. However, it needs to be organized so the most important details are displayed upfront. Once you have a great marketing dashboard setup, don’t stop making improvements to it. Ask about other information for your marketing strategy you would like to see incorporated into the report.
Our digital marketing team has been setting up Data Studio dashboards for hundreds of clients, so we have plenty of experience. We can set up a dashboard for you, even if we do not do any other work for you as an agency. Want to get started? Reach out to ZGM today!