Olivia Atkinson
If you already work with an agency of sorts you’ll probably be familiar with monthly reports. It’s a report you receive at the start of every month reflecting on the data from the previous month.
Monthly reports can include data such as traffic, page views, social media stats, engagement, rankings, domain authority, visibility, enquiries, PR, what’s been actioned that month and what’s to be actioned next month.
What’s included in your monthly report will depend on what you or your agency track and monitor. Even if you don’t work with an agency you should create a monthly report to keep track of progression and reaching goals.
How Do You Create A Monthly Report?
There are many tools you can use to generate the data from the previous month reflecting your marketing efforts. Google Analytics (GA) is the first one to look at.
On this you can determine where the traffic is coming from location wise, which platforms people are using and how people are finding your site. Organic traffic should dominate the type of traffic you receive, however in too many cases paid traffic is heavily relied upon.
Read More: Are You Hooked On Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
You can also use your social media channels to generate data, they all provide there own analytics section now showing you 'Top Performing Posts' and how engaged your audience were the last month.
There are many more tools you can use but some require a subscription, for example SEM Rush monitors how our clients rank in search against keywords.
By collating this data in a presentation style you can start to build up an average of how your website performs, then you can plan and adjust your tactics to improve them.
What Do You Need To Report?
As a company you should be setting yearly, monthly and weekly goals based on your marketing efforts. This could be to get 10 new Twitter followers every week, 4 more enquiries every month and 2000 more users on the site over the year.
By setting these targets you give your marketing efforts a structure and a goal.
Based on your goals and aims you will need to report on the relevant varying factors that could influence them.
For example if your target is to increase your Twitter following, then you need to be tracking not only how many followers you have but the engagement you are receiving from the posts.
This allows you to spot patterns and determine theories on what type of content works best at which time of the day. This then structures your plan for the following month, do more of what worked at different times and see if it performs better?
Website traffic is one of the most common metrics that you will most probably always be tracking. What’s important when retrieving data is to dig deeper. An example of this would be a sudden spike in traffic.
Is this spike reflective of a current campaign or promotion or completely out of the blue? By analysing your Google Analytics you can find out the real reason.
It could be that your website link is being used my bots and generating traffic that last 0 seconds. This would then show that the traffic isn’t something to be applauding as it’s false.
Why Are Monthly Reports Important?
Monthly reports are important as they give you the data and the facts to influence future marketing decisions.
They also provide evidence that a campaign or change in tactic works, you can then use this to present your ideas and show the impact it has had.
Time can go by quickly, especially in busy periods so it's important to keep a track all year round. By reporting monthly you can quickly create a set of data that reflects the changes you've made in your marketing efforts.
Having your data together all in one place makes it easier for other people to read and analyse rather than making colleagues individually login to Google analytics and each social platform.
Conclusion
Each company normally set goals and targets for the coming year. If you don't track and report on these figures then the goals become irrelevant as you'll never know if you've reached them.
Sales rely heavily on targets and goals as more often than not their salary/wage/bonus is determined on their results.
Marketing goals should be taken just as seriously to show that the work being done is generating results.
About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.