Three years ago, the majority of agency leaders reported an increase in revenue and profit – 56% and 55%, respectively. At the same time, 79% claim that they are confident of attaining stronger and stabler profitable growth in the next 12 months. These numbers are according to a 2019 report from Global Digital Outlook.
While it may sound promising, growing a business by today’s standards has never been challenging. This level of success is based on the ability of businesses to deliver a wide range of services to clients who expect nothing less than excellent results. Another factor to look at is the highly competitive market. Clients won’t hesitate to pull out from a negotiation if they feel like they’re not satisfied with the results they’re getting. To put it bluntly, agencies need to impress and perform at a top-level.
Looking back five years ago, the 2016 edition of the same study gave indications that there’s a huge gap between being creative and being able to satisfy clients. Always bear in mind that at the end of the day, your clients want results. If your agency cannot present a real ROI (return on investment), they’ll move on from you.
Establishing or fixing a relationship between your business and your client can’t be done overnight. It’s a slow and steady process of building trust and confidence. However, you can speed up that process by making the client reports a lot better and easier both for yourself and your client. Using the right tools, you don’t have to become a slave to spreadsheets and overwhelming data.
That’s why we did our research and found eight marketing reporting tools that some of the top digital marketing agencies use to report to their clients. By using these tools, you should make feedback easier worthwhile.
The Best Digital Marketing Reporting Tools
To make sure each tool falls under their respective sub-group, we divided all of them into four categories:
- All-in-one
- Social management
- Public Relations
- SEO performance
All-in-one
Let’s start with the tools that do a little bit of everything we need. The field of digital marketing is long and wide. Modern digital marketing agencies offer a lot of services, from creating websites to managing ad spending. They even do social media marketing, where they manage all of their client’s social media accounts.
In short, agencies of today use a series of different strategies to reach a certain goal and satisfy their clients’ needs. However, even if these strategies are different, the reporting shouldn’t be separate. Clients don’t have the patience or time to look over different reports and try to piece them together.
What you need are marketing reporting tools that will let your clients see everything in one place to understand how each strategy contributes to the final goal. With that said, here’s a list of the best “all-in-one” reporting tools, according to Mention, that will greatly help compile all of the strategies into a single report.
1. Cyfe
Cyfe is an excellent reporting tool because it gathers data and dashboards from all the analytics tools you use and places them into a single place. At the same time, it also has integrations with Google Spreadsheet, enabling you to add other important information such as share numbers and backlinks for specific pieces of content.
Once you’ve compiled all of the data you need for your report, you can generate a unique URL that you can send to your client. Not only is this a convenient method, but it also reduces the time you’ll spend on reporting by half.
Many marketers like Web Profits and IboundJuction use Cyfe to track performance metrics across several platforms. They claim that their clients don’t have to log in to every platform’s analytics. Instead, they can see everything they want in a single place, which is very convenient.
2. Google Analytics
In a list of some of the best-paid marketing reporting tools, it’s easy to forget about Google Analytics. But we made sure we didn’t. Most of the applications on this list are enterprise-level tools that cost a hefty sum. However, Google Analytics is still a reliable reporting tool that offers many options while being available for free.
Many web marketers even think that Google Analytics is more than enough to provide them with all the metrics and stats they need to provide a comprehensive report to their clients. Digital marketer Any Crestodina even claims that Google Analytics is “the most robust web traffic analysis system.”
With Google’s constant strive for relevance and influence, Google Analytics continues to get better. What’s more important is that it’s available for free. It’s an easy-to-use tool that anyone can use. While it may not look as slick as other tools on this list, it’s pretty hard to beat in terms of the overall value that it brings to the table.
Social Management
Digital marketing agencies also play a huge role in building and safeguarding their client’s online brands and reputations. That’s why knowing what people are saying about their online is a crucial part of the process.
These digital marketing reporting tools will help in social listening and reputation management. It helps keep track of what people are saying about your client online and provides complete data about social interactions.
1. Mention
Social listing is an essential part of building relationships with your clients. Companies want to know what people, especially their followers, are saying about them online. That means you need to be able to tell them that information accurately.
It can be complicated if you don’t know the exact data. Fortunately, Mention can make it simple for you. This tool lets you track any keyword from anywhere on the internet. It includes all the top social media platforms, plus extras like forums and review sites.
In addition, Mention also features valuable analytics tools to let you do the following:
- Compare client share of voice against major competitors
- Analyze the engagement level of client’s social media posts.
- See a visual representation of the client’s marketing campaign.
- Identify the best-performing piece of content to promote it further.
At just $29 per month, you can create your Mention account and build your social media marketing plan the way you want it.
2. Reputology
If you’re serving brick-and-mortar businesses, Reputology is an absolute necessity. It aggregates reviews from more than 70 online sources, including Yahoo, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. So, for instance, if your client operates 25 stores in four different countries, you will know how each location is reviewed by local customers online. At the same time, you will also learn the overall reputation of the brand in each location.
- At $29 per month, Reputology lets you do the following:
- See negative reviews so you can respond quickly.
- Track-specific locations worldwide.
- Monitor and compare your results with your competitors.
- Thank customers who leave good reviews.
Reputology’s workflow tool will let you coordinate with your team and make sure the necessary tasks are dealt with.
Public Relations
Every public relations specialist wants to focus on the essential task, creating and providing effective communications strategies to their clients. However, that’s only doable if you’re not spending hours on reporting. That’s why you should put your trust in artificial intelligence and try one of the two PR tools listed below:
1. CoverageBook
Digital marketing PR agencies don’t want to waste their time on reporting. Fortunately, CoverageBook is an excellent tool for this matter. It helps track the number of coverage pieces, links earned, the readership, and overall ROI for a campaign.
As described on their website, CoverageBook condenses hours of reporting into minutes. You get a repository for all of your past campaigns and their records. All of this data will show you what worked and what didn’t, giving you a clearer outlook of what strategies to pursue in the future.
If you’re fed up with your complicated collection of spreadsheets, CoverageBook’s $99 per month plan is the solution you’ve been looking for. It will help you create an informative spreadsheet at half the time it takes when you do it manually.
2. Buzzsumo
One of the most effective ways to analyze and assess the performance of your content is to check the number of social shares it drives. If your goal is to get attention by building some “buzz” towards your campaign, social media is the best place to do that.
Buzzsumo can help you check the performance and popularity level of a given publication’s articles over time. It also shows the number of social shares your PR hits across various social channels. Buzzsumo provides all of this accurate information quickly, which is excellent if you’re making frequent reports to your clients (bi-weekly or monthly).
Right now, Buzzsumo’s ‘Agency’ plan costs $239 per month, which is more than a great deal if you want to maximize your client’s social media influence.
SEO Performance
Finally, we have the SEO – arguably the most popular digital marketing strategy and one that clients pay attention to the most. Clients are obsessed with their SEO numbers. They want to know how you improved their search rankings and how much traffic it has led.
The following digital marketing reporting tools will help you monitor all of the essential SEO metrics you need to report back to your clients. These tools will help you determine if your client’s SEO has improved or not, from keyword performance to new backlinks added.
1. Moz
We can’t talk about the best SEO tools without mentioning Moz – the most comprehensive SEO tool with an excellent built-in reporting system. With Moz, you can keep track of your client’s SEO performance across a variety of metrics. These metrics include on-page SEO, search visibility, and traffic coming from organic search.
The best part about Moz is that it lets you create custom reports – even from scratch. At the same time, its $99 monthly price tag lets you do the following:
- Monitor key metrics from a single platform.
- Track several campaigns of different clients.
- Automate different reports for different users within a client’s business or organization.
Essentially, Moz lets you track any SEO-related metric. You can then send these results to your clients without having to exert much effort. It makes things simple, easy, and comprehensive for you.
2. SEMrush
Highly regarded as a Moz clone, SEMrush is an excellent SEO and one of the best digital marketing reporting tools that let you track vital metrics for yourself and your competitors. With SEMrush, you also have access to other analytics tools. That means you won’t need to access Search Console or Google Analytics. Just place any domain into SEMrush, and you’ll be able to see all of the keywords that it ranks for.
Being able to view the competitor’s performance is also an interesting feature. Not only will it let you know what your rivals are doing, but it will also let you copy the strategies they do that are working for them. At the same time, SEMrush is also a brilliant tool for competitive analysis and a fast way to jump into opportunities that your competitors failed to venture into.
At a similar price of $99 per month, SEMrush lets you do the following;
- Track client’s keyword rankings.
- Do audits to see and determine if the client’s site is fully optimized.
- Discover new keywords to target.
- Monitor pay-per-click (PPC) and find new opportunities to increase client’s SEO scores.
BONUS: Invoicing Tool
Digital marketing agencies also need to get paid for all of the work that they do. That’s why it’s essential to use an effective invoicing system to help you bill your customers the right way. While there are a ton of options available, we personally recommend ReliaBills.
ReliaBills is a great invoicing tool that you can utilize for sending invoices. It offers a plethora of options to help you create and send your invoice to your client. By creating a free account, you will get access to all of the site’s features.
From creating a unique invoice to sending reminders to your clients and setting up recurring payments, ReliaBills does it all for you. The platform even sends notifications via email about the status of your invoice. That way, you’ll not only get paid on time, but you can also track the progress of your invoice.
ReliaBills offers the following services:
Professional Invoices
ReliaBills lets you create professional, automated invoices that you can send to your customers every billing cycle. This streamlined process allows businesses to save time and money by cutting down on administrative tasks while improving overall efficiency.
Personalized Invoice Emails
Every invoice is individually personalized based on customer preferences, including email or snail mail delivery of statements with different due dates for each customer. Customers have the option to change their payment method, too.
Recurring Billing
ReliaBills also offers a superb recurring billing service that allows customers to pay for services or products on a monthly basis automatically. This eliminates the need for manual payments every month and provides businesses with a steady stream of cash flow.
With recurring payments, customers have the option to pay their invoices automatically using a debit or credit card on file. This convenient feature eliminates the hassle of remembering to pay bills every month and cuts down on late fees.
Customer Support
ReliaBills is always here to help both business owners and their customers when it comes to recurring payments. Our customer support team is available 24/11 to answer any questions or concerns.
As you can see, the advantages of recurring payments are clear. Businesses and customers alike should take advantage of this payment type to simplify their lives and save money. For businesses, ReliaBills offers various services that make it easy to get started with recurring payments.
For customers, there’s no need to open and act on invoices every billing cycle with ReliaBills. Our automated invoice processes take the hassle out of recurring payments, leaving you more time to focus on running your business or spending quality time with family and friends!
Reporting and Tracking
Recurring billing software provides detailed reports on customer activity, including payments received and due, total amount billed, and more. This valuable information helps businesses track their spending and identify growth opportunities.
Customer Support
ReliaBills offers an active customer support line, as well as a dedicated FAQ section for each service page. We want to make sure that our customers get the proper help with any questions or problems they may have. ReliaBills wants to ensure that your billing process is as easy and efficient as possible!
ReliaBills is 100% free. All you need is to create an account, and you’re all set. If you want more features, you can upgrade to ReliaBills Plus for a one-time payment of $24.95.
Wrapping Up
So, which will you choose? It will depend on your particular needs. If you already have a range of specialized digital marketing reporting tools, you might want to go for an “all-in-one” option to bring all of these metrics to a single platform. Otherwise, you can choose from the other options on this list. Just make sure you do your research to determine which tool works best for you.
