The time-consuming reality of marketing agency reporting
Every client wants to see how their marketing agency uses their budget to understand how their money is being spent. To provide transparent reports to their clients, agencies spend an enormous amount of time and resources. On average, a client monthly report requires 5 hours, while more complex reports can take over 8 hours. Why does it take so long?
In most cases, marketing experts manually compile reports that showcase campaign performance and ROI. Here is what this process typically looks like:
- Data collection from tools and platforms, such as Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, advertising platforms, email and outreach tools, CRM apps, etc. The data can be exported as CSV files or loaded to Google Sheets. Not to mention the good-old copy-pasting.
- In addition to numbers and text, reports may also contain visual evidence in the form of screenshots. Marketers also need to attach those with contextual descriptions and explain insights for each data point.
- Eventually, all this extracted data is formatted and organized into client-friendly reports or presentations. They can be either shared online or sent via emails to the clients.
For a mid-sized agency managing 20 clients, reporting tasks alone may take 100-160 hours per month. If an agency provides weekly reports to their clients, not to mention ad-hoc reporting requests, the time investment increases significantly. Be prepared to add up to 25% of a marketing team’s productive hours.
Time is not the only problem
Manual reporting is a time-intensive process that is also associated with other issues:
- High risk of human error during data collection and calculations
- Inconsistent reporting formats across different team members and clients
- Delayed insights due to time-consuming data collection and organization
- Increased operational costs due to inefficient resource allocation
Moreover, such reports are mostly static, i.e., they lack interactivity and real-time updates. So, a marketing manager needs to spend additional hours to make reports up-to-date.
Marketing reporting done right – automation as a lifeline
What if I said that instead of spending 100 hours per month on reporting, you could spend just a few minutes to make a coffee 🙂 An automated reporting system transforms how agencies deliver insights to their clients. Instead of static reports, your clients will have access to dynamic dashboards that always display up-to-date information. Here is what you need to ensure efficient marketing agency reporting:
1. Automated data collection
This is the foundation of efficient reporting since it ensures your reports showcase the recent data. To automate data collection, you can either use data automation solutions like Coupler.io or develop custom data integrations with your marketing data sources. The latter is an advanced option since it requires a tech-savvy expert who can set up and maintain the integration. Therefore, SaaS options look more attractive to marketing experts.
Why Coupler.io and similar tools are better
- No coding or technical background is required to use.
- Supports multiple marketing platforms to automate the data load to spreadsheets and BI tools.
- Provides built-in data transformation options to filter, sort, and make your data analysis-ready.
- Refreshes data at customizable intervals (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.).
- Offers a library of predesigned report templates for marketing, sales, finance, and more.
2. Data visualization
An actionable client report must be clear and visually appealing. This can be achieved by adding charts, graphs, scorecards, and other visual elements that help clients derive insights from the data. The best way to tailor such a report is by using data visualization or BI tools like Looker Studio, Power BI, or Tableau.
And it’s not only about showing simple visuals like a pie chart with top marketing channels. Advanced data visualization also includes interactive elements like filters, drill-downs, and other data exploration options. In addition, you can combine tables with visuals to make your reports balanced and avoid overwhelming users with purely numbers or charts.
3. Focus on key business results
Efficient client reports must go beyond vanity metrics and display real business impact. For instance, the number of impressions a campaign has generated is low value unless you show how many leads it has brought. So, marketing experts must ensure their reports showcase metrics that let clients understand key business results. Here are some examples:
- E-commerce performance metrics, including purchases, average order value, customer lifetime value, etc.
- Lead generation metrics, including qualified leads, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, etc.
- Customer journey insights from first impression to final conversion.
- Goal completion tracking aligned with business objectives.
- Marketing channel performance and attribution.
4. Client access to the insights
If your agency still sends PDF reports to clients, then I have some bad news for you. A better way to handle client reporting is to provide clients with 24/7 access to live dashboards. This can be done with a couple of clicks, but it will spare you the routine of downloading reports as files and sending them via email. Not to mention, this way, you decrease the risk of human mistakes like sending reports to other clients.
As a result, your clients get self-service access to the report and can explore data independently using interactive filters. For example, they can filter data by the desired period to compare results or check dynamics.
Another crucial thing to ensure is the mobile-friendliness of your reports. Keep in mind that approximately 30-35% of marketing dashboard views come from mobile devices. So, if your client reports have mobile-friendly interfaces for on-the-go access, your clients will be happy 🙂
Importance of transparent reporting
A reasonable question any agency marketer may ask is ‘Do my clients need all this?’ Maybe they are totally okay with monthly emails and PDF reports. And there is a simple answer to this:
Client’s trust is built on data
Transparent reporting is the way to build a successful agency-client relationship. Clients want a complete understanding of their marketing performance. Automated, easy-to-access reports are the best way to show them progress and achievements. They show how you spend their money and what results it brings. This transparency contributes to your communication since clients have access to up-to-date reports that give instant answers.
Such proactive data-sharing is an indicator of trustability. Your agency shows that you have nothing to hide. This, in turn, increases customer satisfaction and client retention.
Marketing dashboard for B2B agencies
Automated marketing reports are great in the long run. However, you need to invest resources upfront to build one, gather feedback, and scale. While this is a solid approach, there is a better alternative – using a predesigned dashboard.
Coupler.io has designed one specifically for marketing agencies. Moreover, it was developed in partnership with Alina Zaiets, the founder and CEO of Marketing Pot, a marketing agency for SaaS and B2B service companies.
Why is this dashboard needed?
The main reason behind this was the need to combine data from different sources into one dashboard, which is convenient for CEOs who are not hands-on in marketing to review.
Imagine a situation when you have, say, 10K traffic but only a few leads. What should you pay attention to in order to identify and resolve this bottleneck?
Geography is the first thing to explore. You need to be sure you are focusing on the proper target audience. So, we’ve taken the information about traffic by country from GA4 and added it to the dashboard.
Moving to the next question: What channels does your traffic come from and what pages does it land on?
To analyze this, we’ve added the possibility of selecting the channel and the landing page and reviewing this data separately. This way, you can analyze the user’s intent (as you already know how they reached your page) and consider the next steps.
Also, this information is required when you invest in certain pages, so you follow their exact stats.
What the dashboard includes
The dashboard consists of 4 pages: Overview, Landing Page Performance, Conversions, and PPC Overview.
Overview
Basically, on this page you get an overview of channel groups and countries from which you get traffic to your website. The information is collected from GA4, which is the main source of data for this dashboard, but not the only one.
Conversions
On this page, you can see how many total users you have and what number of those got converted. The top panel offers 4 filtering options:
- Type of conversion
- Traffic channel group
- Landing page
The fourth filter allows you to search through groups of landing pages using logical operators, such as Equals, Contains, Starts with, Regex, and In.
The chart about conversion dynamics shows the impact of marketing efforts, i.e. how many users each source has brought you.
The funnel section breaks down the progression from initial interest to final conversion. It has five stages that you can select based on your conversion events in GA4.
This hierarchical view helps identify bottlenecks and optimization opportunities in the conversion process.
Landing page performance
This section provides a complete picture of landing page performance based on data from Google Analytics 4 and Search Console. This combination of information covers SEO and all other marketing activities.
Of course, you can filter scorecards, charts, and the table by landing page. Here are the key metrics used to analyze performance:
| GA4 metrics | Search Console metrics |
|---|---|
| – Total users – New users – Sessions – Key events – Average session duration – Bounce rate | – Impressions – Clicks – CTR – Average position |
PPC overview
Paid channels are another valuable asset to your marketing efforts for your clients. Therefore, the B2B agency marketing dashboard provides a separate page to overview the performance of direct spends.
You can connect as many advertising platforms as you need including Google Ads, Meta Ads, Quora Ads, etc.
At the end of the page, you’ll see breakdown tables for campaigns and sources for more granular insights.
Example of a real case you can solve with the dashboard
Let’s look at how the dashboard works using a real example. One company with 15K traffic had only 2-3 MQLs a month. However, the spending on SEO was about $3K/mo. The company also launched PPC campaigns from time to time to test new niches.
Using the dashboard, we revealed the following insights:
- 60% of traffic was from non-target countries, so it shouldn’t even be considered in the analysis.
- There were only 4 pages on the website that generated traffic with commercial intent that was interesting for the company. So, we focused on these pages.
- We’ve cut off the SEO budget used for non-focus pages and some of this budget was re-balanced on behalf of focus pages.
- As a result, we’ve reduced the SEO budget by 30%, improved the positions of target keywords from 11-20th to top-5, and finally, demonstrated a 3x growth of the number of MQLs within 2 months.
All this was possible thanks to the right focus that we’ve achieved using the right dashboard.
Who can use the dashboard?
This B2B marketing dashboard has a custom setup. You’ll need to connect multiple data sources as separate connectors, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and the advertising platforms used. However, our team of data experts can implement this for any agency, so they can easily use it for each of their clients. This gives clients 24/7 access to their marketing performance data and the ability to monitor the progress in real-time.
Transparent relationship – checked ✅
Additionally, agencies won’t have to spend time and resources on the reporting preparation each month.
Furthermore, you can expand the capabilities of the dashboard by adding other data sources. For example, it can provide insights into cold outreach data, email marketing, finance data (working hours or additional costs for links), and much more.
We can implement the same dashboard for you or make a custom one. Our data experts are ready to help you create the perfect reporting solution for your agency.
Automate agency reporting with Coupler.io
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