What is a marketing automation report?
A marketing automation report is a document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., lead scoring, email open rates, conversion rates), enabling teams and agencies to analyze automation workflows and campaign performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Marketing automation reports are typically created using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a marketing automation report?
An actionable marketing automation report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive marketing automation reports
Executive reports for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show marketing automation's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Marketing ROI analysis: by automation workflow, using attribution models for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
- Lead funnel analysis: lead generation, nurturing, and conversion metrics
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Marketing manager automation reports
Manager reports have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, funnel stage, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall automation workflow, product, client, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for channel and tactic mapping
- Lead scoring and nurturing analysis
Operational Marketing Automation Reports
Operational reports for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Email automation: delivery, open, click-through, conversion rates
- Lead management: lead scoring, qualification, and assignment
- Workflow performance: automation triggers, actions, and outcomes
- CRM integration: contact updates, data syncing, and error tracking
Operational marketing automation reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a marketing automation report?
To build a marketing automation report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are HubSpot and Marketo for automation performance, Salesforce for CRM data, and email platforms for campaign metrics.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of marketing automation report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like lead tracking, email performance, and workflow analysis.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, automation events, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your marketing automation reporting use cases, such as lead tracking, email performance, and workflow analysis.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., lead score, email opens, conversion rate, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, campaign name, workflow step, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your marketing automation reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your marketing automation reports:
Share
Share your marketing automation reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a marketing automation report?
Marketing automation reports should include a mix of funnel—lead generation, nurturing, conversion—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of automation campaigns towards business goals. They include:
Marketing funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the marketer perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Lead generation metrics: new leads, lead sources, email sign-ups
- Nurturing metrics: email opens, click-through rates, engagement scores
- Conversion metrics: qualified leads, sales conversions, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your marketing outputs to the cost, including:
- Lead generation: CPL (Cost per Lead)
- Nurturing: CPE (Cost per Engagement)
- Conversion: CPA (Cost per Acquisition), CPP (Cost per Purchase)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Lead generation: Lead conversion rate
- Nurturing: Engagement rate
- Conversion: Conversion rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your marketing automation performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: automation spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these marketing automation KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: email, social, HubSpot vs Marketo
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: funnel stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
