Campaign Reporting Checklist

At the end of a digital marketing campaign, it’s best practice to review your efforts, which is also known as a report.  

Conducting a digital marketing report will help you better understand your campaign and really get to know how it performed, including what aspects need to be improved and what needs to be exemplified. A report is one of the best industry strategies as it can help your future performance.  

If you’re unsure what the best KPIs for digital marketing you need to focus on or what question you need to ask, use the following to help you build a fantastic report. 

Best KPIs for Digital Marketing 

One of the key aspects of success when doing digital marketing reporting is to hone in on the metrics and key performance indicators that matter to each campaign. KPIs help quantify your report and makes things less abstract. Analyzing information and putting it into easy-to-digest percentages or decimals can make it simpler to evaluate your performance.  

Here are some of the best KPIs for digital marketing reporting:  

Social Media:  

• Click-through-rate (CTR) – This metric looks at how many clicks the link within a social post has gotten in comparison to how many impressions it’s gotten. The formula to create this metric is simple: divide the number of clicks from a source with the number of impressions. This will provide a percentage.  

(This metric can also be used to measure the performance of a Google ad campaign and an email marketing campaign.)  

• Audience Growth Rate – This metric helps you see how well your brand is growing on socials and can help you figure out how well an awareness campaign has gone. To figure out this KPI, simply divide your new number of followers by your total and multiply by 100. This will help you see how fast your brand is increasing.  

Website:  

• Users – This metric focuses on the number of users your website has gotten over a certain period of time. The number of users is usually compared with the previous month to see how things have changed. Sessions are similar; however, these don’t distinguish unique visitors, meaning you’ll likely have more sessions due to repeat users.  
• Bounce Rate – This metric displays in a percentage the number of people who visited a page to just quickly exit it. Bounce rate can be a good indicator of the suitability of your landing page, as a high one indicates that it’s not meeting the users’ expectations, perhaps due to subpar UI or an unappealing product.  

Google ads:  

• Cost-per-Click (CPC) – This metric illustrates how expensive it is to attract a user to your site via a Google ad campaign. It divides the cost of the whole campaign by the number of clicks. This can help you work out if this marketing tactic is financially viable.  

These are just a few of the best KPIs for digital marketing. However, so many others can be useful in your reports, so it’s worth investigating these more to see what is relevant to your business and your aims.  

Questions To Ask  

When conducting digital marketing reporting, there are also a variety of questions that you should ask to help your team better gauge the success of the marketing campaign.  

Asking the following questions can help you highlight what went well in your campaign that you can use and enhance for your next project, and they can also be a useful aid in figuring out what went wrong and what should be changed in the future.  

Here are some of the questions that you should include in your campaign reporting template:  

1. Did you hit your targets?  

This question should be the first that you answer within your campaign reporting template. When you create a campaign, there should be a sole purpose for them, a single objective that you want to achieve. This is one of the fundamentals of digital marketing.  

Common social campaign targets include getting a certain number of shares to boost engagement, while a good target for a PPC ad campaign will be attracting more click-throughs to a certain landing page.  

When reporting on a campaign, you need to compare your actual performance with what you wanted. When doing this, make sure to focus on the metrics that matter. This is a lot easier to do if you create SMART goals at the beginning of your campaign.  

SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely, making them really easy to compare results with. 

2. What has worked well?  

This question helps you look at the specifics of your campaign and analysis the finer details of it. When looking for what has worked well, you’re looking for certain aspects that have matched or even outperformed their expectations.  

For example, say if a goal was to increase conversions on a certain sales page on your website, and your campaign tried to improve it by using social posts, a Google ad campaign, and some email marketing. Your conversions improved 30% from the previous month at the end of the campaign.  

When digging deeper, you see that the majority of people who made conversions came from your email marketing campaign, while your social posts didn’t attract much. This shows that your email marketing strategy worked really well and should perhaps be something that you focus on more in future campaigns.  

If you’re looking to boost website performance and Google traffic, check out our guide on Digital Marketing Strategy to help.  

3. What could have gone better?  

On the flip side to the previous question, it’s also worth looking at what didn’t have such a high impact on your campaign. With the previous example, it’s clear that social media marketing didn’t perform well.  

This information means that this is an area that needs improving for next time or that you need to question if it’s worth doing at all. Try to figure out what about this channel that didn’t do well in your digital marketing reporting. The tone of voice may not have been correct, the branding might have been inconsistent, or maybe even a more visual post like an infographic or video would have been more engaging.  

When things don’t go well, you mustn’t ignore them, and instead, use them to help improve your performance in the future. This is why this question is important to include in the campaign reporting template. 

4. How was the offer/product/incentive received?  

This question looks at how your marketing efforts impacted your business financially and evaluates if the campaign has led to an uptake of purchases or interest.  

This question can be really useful in seeing the bigger picture of your campaigns, as ignoring this question could make you miss the bigger picture.  

For example, say your aim was to increase the traffic on a certain product page via social media campaigns, increasing traffic to spur on more sales. If you only looked at the page views and bounce rate, you may deem the campaign a success if both metrics have improved. However, if this extra activity hasn’t led to a similar spike in sales, then that’s indicative of a problem.  

In this specific scenario, the issue could be that the landing page doesn’t match the user’s expectations, that you’re targeting the wrong demographic or more. Asking this question can help you better tailor and improve your campaigns for the future. 

5. Has seasonality impacted this campaign?  

Seasonality is the phenomenon where the needs and wants of a user change and alter over a year. This means that to market well online; you need to tap into these seasonal desires and tailor your approach to meet these altering needs.  

This issue is that getting your marketing right to fit these seasonal pain points can be tough, which means that you can often get it wrong. Asking this question allows you to better look into how to make your campaigns match the intent and needs of the user so that you can perform better next time. Seasonal marketing is one of the fundamentals of digital marketing. 

6. What are the key learnings from this campaign  

This question is a good way to wrap up your campaign report, which is why it’s the final question on our campaign reporting template. This question forces you to look back at what you’ve identified in the other questions and turn that information into an actionable plan that you can put into place to hopefully find more success in future digital marketing projects.   

Conclusion 

Reporting on your past campaigns is a major way to improve your marketing strategy, together with a good understanding of the competitive landscape in your industry. 

To ensure you’re getting the most out of your reports, be sure to use some of the best KPIs for digital marketing discussed and to add the questions outlined into your campaign reporting template.