6 Digital Marketing Report Template Ideas to Win Clients Over

Every agency faces the same challenge: convincing clients that their marketing efforts are delivering real value. While metrics like impressions and clicks might look impressive, they rarely convince clients that their marketing investment is paying off. What clients truly want to see is how your marketing generates leads and revenue.

In this article, we'll explore the components of effective marketing reports, why templates are essential, key metrics to track, and six digital marketing report templates that transform reporting from a tedious obligation into a powerful client retention tool.

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Essential Pieces of a Marketing Report

The type of marketing report that convinces clients and proves value will include these elements:

Brief Executive Summary

Your report should begin with a concise summary highlighting key achievements. Note that the key word here is concise: the purpose of the executive summary is to save your stakeholders time, not give them more to read.

Busy executives should be able to glance at your summary and get a good overview of your marketing performance without diving into details.

KPI Dashboard

Provide an at-a-glance review of your marketing success with a visual overview of your key performance indicators. Include metrics for paid advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads), organic search, social media, and email marketing performance.

Campaign Performance

After providing a visual summary, provide a breakdown of specific campaigns to explain which initiatives drove the strongest results and why. This is also where you should explain any poor performance outcomes—were their economic factors, competitor changes, algorithm shifts, or other complicating factors? Give your stakeholders confidence by demonstrating that you understand exactly what’s going on with your campaigns, whether it’s good or bad.

Recommendations

Conclude with actionable insights based on the data presented. Explain how you plan to address underperforming campaigns and capitalize on successful ones. Draw connections that illustrate how you’re working not just to achieve your marketing goals, but to help your stakeholders reach their wider business objectives.

Importance of Marketing Report Templates

Templatizing your marketing reports is about more than just saving time. Report templates are essential tools for good marketing management. Here’s why:

Consistency in Reporting

Templates ensure that reports remain consistent from month to month, allowing stakeholders to track progress and identify trends across the same metrics. This consistency builds a structured framework for ongoing analysis.

A good template also ensures that your team can deliver high-quality reports even if someone new has to step in and take over. Keeping things consistent gives your stakeholders confidence even when you’re experiencing turnover or key team members are unavailable.

Enhanced Accountability

Regular, templated reporting creates accountability within marketing teams and with stakeholders. When everyone knows exactly which metrics will be reported and when, it turns high performance into a habit.

When you have a bad month, you may be tempted to hide behind vague or inconsistent reporting, but resist that impulse. Believe it or not, being clear and upfront will actually build confidence with your clients, even when the numbers you’re reporting aren’t very flattering. Sloppy reporting, on the other hand, erodes trust and prevents stakeholders from seeing you as a true partner.

Data-Driven Decisions

Well-designed templated reports turn abstract data into clear and actionable insights, allowing you and your stakeholders to make informed decisions based on concrete information. Great reporting doesn’t just help communicate past performance—it creates opportunities to improve future performance as well.

1. Leads by Keyword

For PPC campaigns, keywords are where the action happens. And while Google Ads will tell you which PPC campaigns and keywords drive clicks and traffic, clicks and traffic don't win clients—leads do. A Leads by Keyword report gives clarity on which keywords are actually delivering results.

Benefits of this digital marketing report template:

• Show which keywords are worth bidding on
• Track the ROI of your PPC campaigns
• Eliminate keywords that don't drive real leads

This report shows the return on investment from your PPC campaigns. Clients can see which keywords deliver quotable, high value leads. It will also show which keywords might be generating a lot of clicks, but aren't worth bidding on because they don’t drive qualified leads.

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2. Landing Page Report

Many marketers track landing page performance using metrics like bounce rate or average time on page, and those are important KPIs for your team to track its success. But when you’re putting together a client report, you need to focus on what matters: whether or not these landing pages generate leads. That’s where a leads by landing page report comes in.

Benefits of this report template:

• Find out which web pages attract the most leads.
• Figure out which landing pages should be used in PPC ads.
• Learn which page in your A/B test is driving the most leads.

You might be used to using Google Analytics to track your landing pages. Google Analytics can show you which pages attract traffic, but it can't show you the leads that use your landing pages. A better landing page report would show you the individual leads that convert after landing on each landing page.

3. Lead Value Report

The question that lies at the heart of any client-agency relationship is “How much revenue am I getting from your marketing efforts?” A lead value report addresses this question directly by connecting marketing activities to potential revenue.

To be able to generate this report, you first need to be tracking and assigning value to your leads. You can do this by documenting what products or services each lead is interested in and assigning the cost of those projected purchases to each lead.

Benefits of this digital marketing report:

• Tie marketing to sales revenue
• Show your clients that you're delivering real revenue opportunities
• Report on the revenue-related metrics clients care about

An effective lead value report should show the total value of leads generated through your marketing efforts, broken down by source, campaign, or keyword. This approach transforms your reporting from activity-based metrics to outcome-based metrics.

4. Leads by Source

Every marketer analyzes individual marketing channels like SEO, PPC, email and social media. However, you can get a holistic view of your marketing sources by analyzing them in one report. A Leads by Source and Medium report can show you which marketing channels drive leads.

Benefits of this digital marketing report template:

• Identify the channels that drive the most leads.
• Shift spend from ineffective channels to effective channels.
• See which channels drive valuable conversion actions, such as phone calls.

Most agencies use this report to see what percentage of leads come from Google Organic vs paid search advertising vs social media. This report can help protect you from focusing too much on an ineffective marketing channel. If the Leads by Source and Medium report shows that only two channels drive all your leads, you may need to reassess your strategy. Clients will appreciate the transparency and insights.

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5. Lead Page Report

While landing pages represent the entry point to your website, lead pages are where conversions actually happen. These are the pages where visitors take action—whether that's making a phone call, filling out a form, or starting a chat.

Benefits of this marketing report template

• See which pages on your site drive action
• Find out which pages should be used in PPC campaigns
• Identify opportunities to promote pages that deliver high-quality leads

Both lead page reports and landing page reports are important; they just answer different questions. Whereas landing page reports help you understand how you’re bringing in potential prospects, a lead page report can illustrate how effectively you’re converting those prospects into qualified leads.

6. Monthly Summary Report

While segmented detail reports are valuable for analysis and decision-making, clients often prefer a high-level overview that captures the most important metrics at a glance. In many cases, your agency will be working with one client team or point of contact, and they likely need to answer to internal stakeholders of their own. A summary report provides a neat overview of the essential data points that your clients can use to communicate your progress within their organization.

Benefits of the summary report template:

• Clients can quickly see how your marketing is impacting their bottom line
• See how your marketing is improving month over month
• Report can be sent directly to client's inboxes on the first of the month.

We recommend including these specific sections in a summary report in order to summarize your marketing success and communicate it clearly:

• Total Monthly Leads
• Top Monthly Marketing Sources
• Top Monthly Keywords
• Monthly Leads by Conversion Action (Calls, forms, chats)
• Top Monthly Landing Pages

The report should be visually appealing and easy to understand, with clear headings and concise explanations. The monthly summary within WhatConverts updates live, and we also recommend automating these summaries so they appear in your clients’ inboxes on the first of each month.

Other Metrics to Include

Altogether too many agencies make the mistake of reporting their progress in terms of marketing metrics instead of business metrics. But while lead-based reporting is the only way to communicate the ROI of your work, there are still plenty of reasons to include secondary metrics that offer more detail.

Traffic Metrics

• Website Visits: Total traffic to your site
• Traffic by Source: Breakdown by organic, paid, direct, referral, and social
• New vs. Returning Visitors: Balance of new audience acquisition and retention

Traffic doesn’t make your clients money, but you can’t make your clients money without traffic. Reporting on things like website visits, new vs. returning visitors, and traffic by source (including organic, paid, direct, referral, and social) can give stakeholders a closer look at how you’re broadening your clients’ exposure and introducing their brand to new audiences. Just remember not to stop with traffic—ultimately, you need to be able to demonstrate that the traffic you brought in actually converted into customer revenue.

Engagement Metrics

• Bounce Rate: Percentage of visitors who leave without taking action
• Average Session Duration: Time spent on your site
• Pages Per Session: Depth of engagement with content

Performance indicators like bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration can give clients a detailed view into how and where you’re making tangible improvements to their website. By increasing the amount of exploring that visitors do on your client’s site, you’re giving them more time to make an impression, showcase value, and demonstrate that they’re the best choice to meet each prospect’s needs.

SEO Metrics

• Rankings: Position for target keywords
• Backlinks: New links acquired and total link profile
• Domain Authority: Overall site strength

Search metrics like rankings, backlinks, and domain authority can help stakeholders understand how your work is improving their visibility online and the overall health of their website. Especially if your clients hired you with specific technical issues in mind, these KPIs can provide a way for you to benchmark your progress towards fixing those problems.

Paid Advertising Metrics

• Impressions: How often your ads were shown
• Clicks: User engagement with ads
• CPC (Cost Per Click): Efficiency of ad spend
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): Ad relevance and appeal
• Conversion Rate: Effectiveness at driving desired actions

Agencies that run paid advertising campaigns need their reports to justify not only the cost of their contract, but also the cost of the campaigns they run. It’s not just about showing clients that your campaigns bring in leads and sales value; you also need to prove that you’re generating those results efficiently enough to result in an impressive marketing ROI. Metrics like cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, clicks, and impressions can help demonstrate that you’re using every dollar of your client’s budget wisely.

Revenue Metrics

• Conversion Value: Revenue generated from marketing activities
• ROI (Return on Investment): Overall return on marketing spend
• Customer Acquisition Cost: Cost to acquire a new customer

It’s not enough to provide the pieces that clients need to understand ROI; you need to prove your own marketing ROI in explicit terms. Include metrics like conversion value and customer acquisition cost to drive home exactly how much value you’re bringing to your clients.

Making the Most of Your Reports

Most agencies are used to generating a monthly or quarterly progress report for their clients, but these aren’t the only scenarios where marketing reports can be useful. Make the most of your reports by leveraging them to accomplish multiple purposes.

Campaign Launches and Optimizations

When launching new ad campaigns, marketing teams need structured reporting to track performance from day one. These reports establish baselines and identify early optimization opportunities. Performance marketing specialists rely on daily or weekly reporting to make agile adjustments to targeting, creative, and bid strategies before significant budget is spent.

Stakeholder Communication

Regular reporting creates vital communication channels between marketing teams and stakeholders. C-suite executives, investors, and department heads often require concise KPI dashboards that translate complex marketing analytics into business impact. For ecommerce brands, these reports connect marketing activities directly to revenue metrics, justifying continued investment.

Strategic Planning Cycles

Quarterly and annual planning requires comprehensive marketing reports that go beyond day-to-day metrics. These reports analyze longer-term trends and provide the foundation for future marketing strategy development. They typically incorporate competitive analysis and market trends alongside performance data.

Cross-Department Collaboration

Live reporting dashboards facilitate collaboration between marketing and other departments. Sales teams use lead generation reports to align their follow-up strategies, while product teams leverage user behavior insights from marketing analytics to guide development priorities.

Performance Reviews and Optimization

Marketing teams use structured reporting for internal performance reviews, identifying which channels, campaigns, and tactics deliver the strongest results. These sessions rely on key metrics organized by channel, campaign, and time period to identify patterns and opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden in fragmented data sources.

Using a Digital Marketing Report Template to Show Value

The right digital marketing report templates do more than just communicate data—they transform how clients perceive your marketing services. By focusing on metrics that directly relate to business outcomes, you can shift the conversation from activities to results.

This approach offers several key benefits:

1. Builds trust through transparency: When clients can clearly see how your marketing efforts are generating leads and revenue, they're more likely to trust your expertise and recommendations.
2. Justifies marketing investment: By connecting marketing activities to revenue, you provide concrete evidence that your services are worth the investment.
3. Differentiates your agency: In a crowded market, agencies that can clearly demonstrate their impact on business outcomes stand out from the competition.

The point of these lead-based reports is to show your clients the results you're delivering. Clients don't pay you for traffic or clicks; they pay your agency to deliver leads that their salespeople can turn into revenue. Lead-based reports show how well your marketing efforts accomplish this goal.

Sign up here for a free 14-day WhatConverts trial or request a 30-minute live demo. We’ll answer questions and show you how to use WhatConverts reports.