What is a content marketing report?
A content marketing report is a document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Analytics, SEMrush, HubSpot) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., engagement rates, content reach, conversions), enabling teams and agencies to monitor content performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Content marketing 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 content marketing report?
An actionable content marketing report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive content marketing reports
Executive reports for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show content marketing's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Content ROI analysis: by channel, using attribution for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
- Content performance analysis: engagement, reach, and conversion metrics from content-driven campaigns
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by content engagement cohort (content type, publication date)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Content marketing manager reports
Manager reports have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, content type, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall content, product, client, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for content strategy mapping
- Topic, keyword, content, audience research
Operational Content Marketing Reports
Operational reports for analysts and content managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- SEO: keyword/page rankings, impressions, clicks, speed, errors, backlinks
- Social: post metrics, follower growth, engaging topics/hashtags
- Email: delivery, open, conversion rates
- Content engagement: views, shares, comments, time spent on page
Operational content marketing 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 content marketing report?
To build a content marketing 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 Google Analytics for web analytics, SEMrush for SEO data, CRM or E-commerce for sales and email data, and Instagram or TikTok for Social Media.
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 content marketing report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like content performance monitoring, SEO tracking, and audience engagement.
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, GA4 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 content marketing reporting use cases, such as content performance monitoring, SEO tracking, and audience engagement.
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. Views, engagement, Sessions, conversion rate, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, content type, topic, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your content marketing reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your content marketing reports:
Share
Share your content marketing reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a content marketing report?
Content marketing reports should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—,efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of content marketing efforts towards business goals. They include:
Content funnel KPIs measure the engagement process (from the marketer perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, followers, email deliveries
- Engagement metrics: clicks, comments, shares, video plays, Sessions, average time
- Conversion metrics: custom conversions, leads, purchases, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your content outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
- Engagement: CPC (Cost per Click)
- Conversion: CPA (Cost per Acquisition), CPP (Cost per Purchase)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Visibility: Frequency
- Engagement: CTR, engagement rate
- Conversion: Conversion rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your content marketing performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: content production costs, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these content marketing KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: organic, social, blog vs video
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: content type, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
