What is a creative performance report?
A creative performance report is a tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Adobe Analytics, Behance, Dribbble) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., engagement rate, reach, creative impact), enabling teams and agencies to monitor creative project performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Creative performance reports are typically built 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 creative performance report?
An actionable creative performance report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive creative reports
Executive reports for Creative Directors, CEOs, and clients show the creative team's impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Creative ROI analysis: by project, using attribution for large budgets.
- Project performance analysis: engagement, reach, and impact from creative projects
- Cohort analysis: audience retention and engagement by creative cohort (launch period, platform)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Creative manager reports
Manager reports have cross-platform views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, and project. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-platform reporting: overall project, client, or region reporting across platforms
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for creative trends and mapping
- Content, audience, and creative research
Operational Creative Reports
Operational reports for analysts and creative managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Design: project timelines, revisions, creative performance
- Social: post metrics, follower growth, engaging content
- Content: delivery, engagement, conversion rates
- SEO: keyword/page rankings, impressions, clicks, speed, errors, backlinks
Operational creative 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 creative performance report?
To build a creative performance 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 Adobe Analytics and Behance for creative performance, CRM or E-commerce for sales and engagement 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 creative performance report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like creative monitoring, project pacing, and creative impact.
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 "engagement" and "impact".
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 creative reporting use cases, such as creative monitoring, project pacing, and creative impact.
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. Engagement, reach, Sessions, creative impact, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, project name, creative type, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your creative reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your creative reports:
Share
Share your creative reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a creative performance report?
Creative performance reports should include a mix of visibility, engagement, impact, and efficiency metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of creative projects towards business goals. They include:
Creative funnel KPIs measure the creative process (from the creative perspective), regardless of the platform:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, followers, content deliveries
- Engagement metrics: clicks, comments, shares, video plays, Sessions, average time
- Impact metrics: creative impact, audience retention, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your creative outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
- Engagement: CPC (Cost per Click)
- Impact: CPA (Cost per Acquisition), CPP (Cost per Project)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one creative stage to another
- Visibility: Frequency
- Engagement: CTR, engagement rate
- Impact: Impact rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your creative performance:
- Sales: clients, revenue
- Cost: project spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these creative KPIs, segment them by:
- Platform: paid, social, Instagram vs TikTok
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Project: creative stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
