The typical marketing agency has a lot on its plate. From managing clients and workloads, ensuring everyone meets their deadlines to getting new clients, and much more.
And on top of that, there are marketing agency client reports - one of the cornerstones of a good client-agency relationship.
The problem is that creating a report for just one client can take hours every week depending on the tools you use and the work you do.
But are client reports really all that important?
Today, we're going to show you why they are not going away, as well as highlight a few tools that can help you streamline your report creation.
What you will learn
- why client reporting is important for marketing agencies
- which elements to include in a great client report
- the best tools for creating and automating client reports
- what metrics and insights to add to different types of reports
What is a marketing agency client report
A marketing agency client report is a document that agencies send to clients to update them on the progress of their campaigns. Client reports include the most relevant marketing KPIs, metrics, goals and milestones. All of these are the results that the agency has achieved for the client’s account.
It’s one of the most vital elements of client communication.
As such, it’s crucial for retaining existing clients, as well as winning new ones. There are various types of marketing agency client reports, such as:
- Social media marketing reports
- SEO reports
- PPC reports
- SEM reports
- Facebook Ads reports
- LinkedIn Ads reports
- And many others
Why is a marketing agency client report important?
A marketing agency client report is important because it shows your clients what you have been working on. It shows them what the progress is, and how you've been spending their budget.
Last, but not least, it tells them what results they can hope for. In other words, it fosters transparency.
Additionally, reports can help you put all of your data in one place.
For example, a single report can contain data from Google Analytics, Facebook ads, SEO tools and Google Search Console.
Weekly or monthly reports also help the client get a bird's eye view of your work. And they can do this without checking out a dozen dashboards at once, too.
This leads to better decision-making on their end, as well as more trust in the client reporting process.
But let us go into some more detail.
Enhances agency-client relationships
Have you ever seen a child riding in the back of a car asking "Are we there yet?" every five minutes? Perhaps you've been that child.
Working with clients can sometimes be like that.
Client reporting helps build trust as it shows them exactly what you're working on at a given point in time and how their campaigns are progressing.
You don’t establish yourself as the single source of truth. Instead, you show the client a glimpse into what is happening behind the scenes.
That way, they better understand the work being done as well as the results of your marketing efforts.
If you have a client with a lack of trust, the client reporting process helps instill confidence from the start. With a report, they can get constant updates about the progress of your work.
Showcases agency value
The typical agency charges anywhere from $150 to $200 per hour, which can be a hard pill to swallow for many clients.
While you know that there are many factors influencing these numbers, clients may be wondering what is making your work worth that much. This is where reports come into play.
A client report shows the client the immediate return on investment from their marketing dollars.
They can see metrics such as conversions, as well as the return on ad spend from your ad campaigns. A good report accounts for every dollar spent on marketing activities.
And once again, this builds more confidence and trust for future collaboration. With such transparency and proof, it's also easier to upsell and cross-sell clients on even more services.
Having said all of that, you might be wondering what to include in a marketing report for your clients. Here are some handy tips.
Essential components of an effective marketing agency client report
All marketing reports are different, based on the client, the work being done, and the results the client is expecting.
However, most good client reports have a few things in common.
Here are the elements that every successful client report should include.
Clear objectives and KPIs
In order to clearly show progress to clients, you need to set a baseline for success.
In other words, you need to show them where they are before they started working with your agency, and where your work is taking them.
This means that you need to introduce clear objectives and KPIs (key performance indicators) of the work being done.
For example, if you run an SEO agency looking to grow a client's organic footprint.
In this case, the KPI will be organic traffic to the website, as seen in Google Analytics or some other tool of choice.
Whatever the KPI or objective is, make sure that it's SMART - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Visual representations
Your clients hired your agency because they don't understand the nuances of marketing.
And while they may struggle to understand a Google Ads report, they will understand the data much better when it is visualized.
One of the key elements of a good client report is the visualization. Instead of numbers, offer clients the following:
- graphs
- charts
- diagrams
- pie charts
- widgets
And many other visualization types that come in modern client reporting software.
These not only make your report more interactive, but they are also easier to understand for clients.
They can see progress at a glance, as well as spot potential hurdles. This ultimately leads to better decision-making.
Actionable insights and recommendations
You may think that pulling data from a platform and adding it to a report is good enough for creating reports and calling it a day.
Maybe, if your main aim is to just send updates.
However, let’s say you want a report to be truly valuable to clients.
In this case, you need to give them actionable insights and recommendations on what should be done in the future for better results.
These are some topics you can cover in your reports to add more value:
- What is working well so far?
- What is not working well and why?
- What should be changed to get better results?
- What are the competitors doing better and what could the client do to beat them?
Just a few sentences can make your report that much more valuable.
This is especially so if the intended audience is at an executive level in the client's company.
Custom client reports for different marketing channels
As mentioned before, client reporting has similarities for different industries and clients.
However, if you want an amazing agency client relationship, you'll want to create custom reports according to the different clients, and platforms being used, as well as the goals you want to achieve.
SEO client reports
SEO client reports should provide your clients visibility about your efforts on search engine optimization. This is one of the most common use cases for client reporting, so it's easy to find templates with all the right metrics and widgets for this use case.
These are the KPIs you can use in your reports:
- organic traffic
- new and lost keywords
- keyword movements
- new and lost backlinks
- conversions from organic traffic
- and many others
Social media client reports
This is a rather broad report category, thanks to the variety of social media channels that are available nowadays.
Still, you'll notice that most good reporting tools have templates for each of them. Whichever social media platform you're reporting for, here are some of the metrics you should include:
- reach
- impressions
- audience growth rate
- engagement
- video views
- and many others
PPC client reports
For client reporting, PPC reports are crucial because they show immediate ROI: how much money was invested and what the gains are.
Therefore, accuracy is necessary.
These are some of the main metrics to include in your PPC report:
- cost per click
- click through rate
- conversion rate
- cost per acquisition
- impressions
- and others
5 best practices for agency client reports
Explain the data
Your client probably does not know much about marketing metrics and data - which is why they hired you.
It’s a good idea to set aside some time and explain the most important language that could be confused within the report.
For example, explain the difference between cost per acquisition and cost per lead.
Or maybe, elaborate on metrics such as click-through rate.
The better they understand what the metrics mean, the more likely it is that they will be thrilled with your results.
Without the added meaning, the metrics are just numbers on a screen to them.
Showcase your progress
It’s good to be proud of your results, and don’t expect your clients to understand those great results if you don’t set aside time to show them.
Every time you make a great breakthrough, highlight in your report as the first thing they read upon opening.
For example, winning a new customer for them.
Or beating their competitors in terms of organic traffic or backlinks or something similar.
It may not sound like a lot, but it is a great proof of ROI and can inspire clients to give you more work.
Automate your data collection
Each of the reporting software mentioned above has one thing in common. They integrate with marketing platforms so that when you create a report, all the data is already there.
Let's explain with an example.
You run Facebook ads campaigns for a client and you want to send them a weekly report.
Instead of asking them to look into their Meta dashboard or copying and pasting data from the dashboard to a new report, you can do something else.
You just connect the client's Facebook Ads account to your reporting tool and their data is shown in real time.
Every time you create a new report, it refreshes with new data.
You save immense amounts of time and the report data is always accurate.
Schedule your reports
If you have a lot of clients, remembering each one of them all the time can be a hassle.
Even with a dedicated account manager for every client, you need to send out reports regularly and make sure that they are accurate and up to date.
Modern reporting software lets you schedule reports to go out on specific dates.
For example, once a week, once a month, or at custom intervals.
And since the reports are directly connected to clients' accounts, the data is always fresh and accurate.
This saves time for your agency and leaves more room for doing the actual work rather than client reporting.
Use customizable report templates
Starting a report can feel like staring at a blank page with an essay to write. Luckily, most reporting tools nowadays have reporting templates for different uses.
For example, Whatagraph has 100+ templates.
They have different use cases such as SEO, PPC, paid ads, Shopify, Bigcommerce, various social media platforms and more.
You can just grab a template to get started and it will contain the most relevant data points for that use case.
Simply connect your client's accounts and the data populates in front of your eyes.
Also, you can customize these reports to your liking: with your own design, widgets, data points, colors, fonts and more.
Reporting tools for marketing agencies in 2023
Long gone are the days when you had to create reports manually.
You would usually copy and paste data from different marketing platforms into a Powerpoint presentation. Today's agencies use modern client reporting tools that let clients view reports as web pages in the cloud.
Modern reporting tools use automation to save time for agencies, as well as offer some benefits for clients.
Automated reporting software can help quicken client reporting by pulling in key metrics into a client report template every week or month.
Here are the most popular client reporting tools for digital marketing agencies.
Whatagraph
Whatagraph is a marketing reporting tool built for agencies. It has features such as report automation (creation and report delivery), automated reports and live client reporting dashboards, 40+ data integrations and many others.
The biggest advantage of Whatagraph is its ease of use, thanks to the drag-and-drop report builder. If you don't want to create reports from scratch, there are 100+ report templates for different use cases that you can start from.
There is even a white-label feature for agencies, allowing you to remove the Whatagraph logo and add your own agency as the report author.
As for the downsides, Whatagraph can be pretty expensive for smaller agencies, with the cheapest plan starting out at $223 per month.
AgencyAnalytics
Built for and used by agencies, AgencyAnalytics has more than 6,000 agencies that use this product to automate their client reporting.
One of the biggest upsides is that this tool offers 75+ data integrations, leaving many competitors in the dust.
If you do SEO, this might be the best fit for you as it has its own in-house SEO tool suite. You can monitor backlinks, track rankings and perform technical audits directly from AgencyAnalytics.
It may not have all the bells and whistles of a standalone SEO tool but is considered one of the best reporting tools for agencies.
As for AgencyAnalytics' downsides, we have to mention the pricing.
It seems competitive as it starts at $12/month/campaign but as you begin adding more clients and campaigns, you'll have to do some proper maths and it will turn out even more expensive than other tools on this list.
Growth Nirvana
If you don't want to go for the high-priced reporting tools and want to give a newcomer a shot, GrowthNirvana is a relatively new player in the analytics arena.
It offers 300+ data sources with various marketing platforms as well as data warehouses.
You can use it to create marketing reports as well as live dashboards that clients can access in real-time.
As for the downsides, there is no free plan and no publicly available pricing.
The 30-day free trial should be enough to help you get started, though.
Megalytic
If you want to do client reporting in an affordable way, Megalytic may be a good choice for your agency.
There are two ways to get this tool: as a connector for Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) and as a standalone reporting tool.
Since we're primarily interested in the latter case, you'll want to know that the standalone reporting tool costs $39.99 per month for 10 reports, 10 connections, and one user.
This may be good enough if you run a very small agency but you'll soon run out of this limit.
Other than that, this is a pretty intuitive tool that is easy to use, with only one major downside - it can get glitchy when it handles large volumes of data.
Key takeaways
- A marketing agency report helps build the client agency relationship. It inspires trust, proves ROI, and allows you as an agency to upsell the client more easily in the future
- A good report needs to have clear objectives and KPIs, visual representations of your results, as well as insights on what went well and why
- There are many client reporting tools to choose from, so pick the one that has the data integrations you need, a solid UX and great pricing
- To create amazing client reports, explain the data in the reports to your clients and showcase the progress you’ve made
- Moreover, automate the data that you collect from the clients’ accounts. Also, automate the reports and schedule them for specific time intervals. It also helps to use customizable report templates as they speed up the report creation process.
Conclusion
Client reports are one of the most important parts of an agency tool set. They don’t just communicate progress to your clients.
They also help establish transparency and trust. As a bonus, they inspire confidence in the client to continue working with you and even increase their spend.
Thanks to modern reporting tools, creating and sending out reports is no longer a hassle. You can automate the tedious parts of report creation.
That way, you can save time and money for your agency. Ultimately, you can focus on the things that matter - such as getting more clients.
