Best CMO report templates for marketing teams and agencies (2024)

What is a CMO report?

A CMO report is a document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., CRM systems, financial reports, social media analytics) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., brand health, customer acquisition cost, revenue growth), enabling CMOs to monitor strategic initiatives and organizational performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives. 

CMO 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 CMO report?

An actionable CMO report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.

Executive CMO reports

Executive reports for CMOs, CEOs, and board members show the organization's strategic impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:

• Strategic ROI analysis: by initiative, using attribution models for large budgets.
• Financial metrics: revenue growth, profit margins, and cost efficiency
• Customer insights: retention, expansion, and lifetime value by customer segment
• Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.

CMO manager reports

Manager reports have cross-departmental views with drill-downs to see performance by product line, region, team member, and strategic initiative. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:

• Cross-departmental reporting: overall performance, product, region reporting across departments
• Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
• Audits for prioritization and spotting issues 
• Competitive analysis for market positioning and strategy mapping
• Market and customer research

Operational CMO reports

Operational reports for analysts and department managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:

• Financial: budget pacing, cost management, revenue tracking
• Brand: brand sentiment, awareness, engagement metrics
• Customer: acquisition, retention, satisfaction rates
• Market: competitive positioning, market share, trend analysis

Operational CMO 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 CMO report?

To build a CMO 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 CRM systems for customer data, financial systems for revenue and cost data, and social media platforms for brand 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:

• How to connect data to Google Looker Studio
• How to connect your data to Google Sheets

Choose a template

Choose from dozens of CMO report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like strategic monitoring, financial analysis, customer insights, and brand performance. 

Learn to copy Looker Studio templates. 

While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or organization. Map your specific metrics, especially custom customer segments, financial data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "strategic goals" and "performance indicators".

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 CMO reporting use cases, such as strategic monitoring, financial analysis, customer insights, and brand performance. 

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: 

1. Select the data source and the account connected to it
2. Choose metrics (e.g., Revenue, customer acquisition cost, brand sentiment, etc.). 
3. Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, product line, region, etc.)

You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports

• Calculated fields
• Charts
• Data blending
• Grouping and tagging

Design

To make your CMO reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand. 

Follow these tutorials to design your CMO reports:

• Design reports on Looker Studio
• Best practices on designing CMO reports

Share

Share your CMO reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.

KPIs to include in a CMO report?

CMO reports should include a mix of strategic, financial, customer, and brand metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of organizational initiatives towards business goals. They include:

Strategic KPIs measure the organization's progress towards its goals: 

• Financial metrics: revenue, profit margins, cost efficiency
• Customer metrics: acquisition, retention, satisfaction
• Brand metrics: awareness, sentiment, engagement

Efficiency KPIs compare your outputs to the cost, including:

• Financial: cost per acquisition, cost efficiency
• Customer: customer lifetime value, acquisition cost
• Brand: cost per impression, engagement cost 

Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one strategic stage to another

• Financial: return on investment
• Customer: conversion rate, retention rate
• Brand: engagement rate, sentiment change

Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your strategic performance:

• Sales: revenue, profit
• Cost: operational expenses, marketing spend
• Efficiency: ROI, cost efficiency
• Effectiveness: average order value, customer lifetime value

To analyze these KPIs, segment them by:

• Department: sales, marketing, operations

• Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly

• Initiative: strategic goal, project

• Business: product line, region

• Customer: demographics, behavior, segment

• Brand: campaign, sentiment, engagement