For most new or veteran Digital Marketing Agencies it can be a bit of a struggle to realize what measures to use when building a report for a client. Oftentimes there’s the confusion that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics are the same thing but they have their differences. It’s important to know how they differ and when you should use each one in order to provide your clients with the most accurate data. So, let’s get into how to build your Digital Marketing Report.

KPI: A KPI is a measurable value that allows businesses to assess how they are performing against a key client goal. They’re very important in terms of tracking your success and progress towards your client’s goal. For example, if you’re an agency offering Lead Generation services, your main KPI would be the number of leads you’ve generated for your client.

Metric – A metric, similar to a KPI, can help you track how your business is performing towards reaching a certain goal. However, metrics provide a more general overview whereas KPI’s tend to be more specific. For example, if you’re providing lead generation services then you want to look at the general overview of the campaigns progress which includes Total Spend, Total Impressions and Total Engagement whereas with KPIs you’d focus on the number of leads generated.

USING KPIS AND METRICS TOGETHER

When creating a report for your client, the one mindset we recommend staying away from is thinking that using one metric over the other is better. In fact, both of these measures complement each other well. Going back to our Lead Generation example, if you present a report to your client using just KPI’s to show that you fell short of the goal for leads generated, well then, the client will be left without reasons as to why the goal isn’t met. Add to that, Metrics, which will give them an overview and broader scale as to how the campaign performed. You can then go into detail as to why the goal isn’t met. Maybe there weren’t enough funds allocated to ad spend etc. but at least now you’re able to provide a complete report to your client.

When it comes to using Funnels, they can be a great source of information in that they are specific to your clients’ needs in order to align with their business goals and how your agency is using the resources to meet their goals. Metrics play a role by making up the top and middle of the funnel and showing the elements that lead to the success of the business goal, which is the KPI. You’re unable to obtain a positive KPI without successful metrics.

In creating a report, remember that you want to tell the whole story of the performance of your marketing efforts. What many agencies do is break up the report into different sections that focus on different aspects of the campaign. For example, some will do a combination of email, website reporting or social media marketing. So, they’ll break up the report between these sections and will highlight the most important KPIs at the beginning of the section and then use the rest of the section to explain why, if at all, they fell short of reaching certain KPIs. They will also use Metrics here to help tell the entire story. More importantly, make sure you understand what measures your client is most interested in knowing about and highlight those at the beginning of your report and speak on how the current progress compares to the KPIs that were discussed during the onboarding call.

As we were able to discuss in this post, KPIs and Metrics are essential to each other and one cannot succeed without the other. So, make sure you understand what your clients KPIs are and what metrics you need to include in the report in order to give your clients the best experience possible.