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It’s no secret that the success of digital marketing campaigns relies on content that converts. Although your marketing reports might offer a list of robust sales data you can link to your content strategy, they might fail to show exactly how new clients and customers found you and how you can repeat this success.
Content marketing reporting tools are powerful engines of information that can tell you the important details — including how your customers found you, the content they responded to, and the chain of click-throughs that led up to the final conversion. These content reporting tools are essential to data-driven marketing. Learn how they can help your business with our guide on the best available reporting tools for digital marketing.
Considerations for Choosing a Content Marketing Reporting Tool
Content marketers often focus on performance metrics, including what content gets the most views and what’s at the top of the list for conversion rates. The actionable insights on these types of metrics might be limited, however, as they don’t offer some key pieces of information like marketing data sources and marketing ROI.
The right content marketing reporting solution also offers a way to monitor your marketing channels and discover the marketing attribution of your traffic. This information allows you to track your customers and understand in depth how to repeat and maintain that customer association.
When choosing a tool, consider your goals for your content marketing. Use marketing reporting tools that help you gather the data you want or optimize your content for greater reach or visibility.
Top 13 Marketing Reporting Tools You Should Be Using
As you weigh the next steps for your content marketing strategy, consider what these analytics and reporting tools could offer your business. They can provide key metrics for your marketing efforts, so you know what to focus on as you develop new digital marketing campaigns.
Here are some of the top available tools to help your business.
1. Databox: Provides Real-Time Analytics in an Easy-To-Use Interface
Many platforms provide detailed analytics, but there can definitely be too much of a good thing — a company might have more data than it knows what to do with and no way of organizing it into actionable insights.
Having a single source of truth allows you to make the most of the data your integrations provide.
That’s the concept behind Databox, which allows content marketers to get essential data from a range of sources, including QuickBooks, Shopify, and HubSpot, among many others. You can funnel that data into your in-house databases and produce spreadsheets and APIs to visualize, track, forecast, and benchmark your data.
2. Buffer: Gives Valuable Insights Into Social Content Performance
Social media platforms can be a boon for brands that want to reach their target audience with compelling and relevant content. However, it takes a bit of marketing strategy to stand out from the competitors, and that starts with an in-depth understanding of what’s working and what isn’t.
Buffer is a comprehensive platform that offers deep insights into social content performance. You can learn who’s following you and what interests them. Buffer helps you track engagement rates and even identify which posts are most effective at meeting your content marketing objectives.
3. Google Analytics 4: Represents the Standard for Web Reporting
Data helps you gain an important understanding of how your customers find you and the journey they take when they interact with your digital properties. An effective web reporting platform integrates all of those interactions into a seamless journey while allowing you to gain broad insight into the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.
The latest iteration of Google's analytics tools, Google Analytics 4 promises deep insights that can translate into actionable results. The platform goes beyond the last click to show how a customer got to you. It also provides AI-driven recommendations to improve performance. Notably, it also allows you to set privacy controls by country so you can stay in compliance with data privacy laws, using measurement techniques other than cookies when necessary.
4. SimilarWeb: Leverages CI and Performance Insights
Digital marketing reporting tools can be the most effective when they put your performance into context. To do that, it helps to have data from the entire internet that offers a new perspective on how traffic moves across the web.
That’s the unique selling point of SimilarWeb, which offers performance insights with billions of daily digital signals and thousands of daily traffic reports. This makes SimilarWeb an ideal platform for a business to undertake competitor analysis, benchmarking, and market research.
5. Moz: Offers SEO Analytics for Content Optimization
The core component of digital marketing is content. Search engine optimization (SEO) — a set of recommendations for structuring and writing content so search engines like Google prefer it — is essential for a company’s audience to find that content. SEO is so deeply ingrained in the toolkit of content marketers that many often take it for granted and forget there are tools available to help them do it well.
Moz offers insight and SEO recommendations for your content. It is also a powerful content marketing reporting platform that offers monitoring capabilities and advice on how to fix specific SEO issues in the content. SEO combined with content personalization can help you bolster your digital impact with expanded content reach.
6. Hotjar: Provides Customer Behavior Insights and Heatmaps
Getting customers to your website is a big part of the battle when developing your marketing strategies. How they behave once they find you is also essential information. The client experience should be seamless to ensure those interested browsers convert into bona fide customers.
Identifying points of friction, confusion, or disengagement on your website is an essential part of content marketing reporting. Hotjar offers heatmaps so you can see how customers experience your site so you can identify what's working well and where you need to improve. It’s also compliant with several important pieces of legislation like the GDPR and CCPA and integrates fully with Google Analytics.
7. BuzzSumo: Reports on Influencers and Content Performance
Data is critical in the online landscape, but it’s important to remember that people can move the conversation. Influencers and media personalities have the power to shift the needle so content is amplified or given the weight of relevance through sharing. These individuals often share not only a desire to share great content or interesting brand news, but they also need content to populate their own social feeds and online conversations.
BuzzSumo is a marketing agency reporting tool that allows companies to benchmark their content performance against competitors. It also helps brands identify which influencers might be strong partners for the brand and gives them the resources to put them in touch. It makes it easier for a business to find influencers to promote their products on topics that align with both your company and their following.
8. Klipfolio: Combines Data Sources in the Cloud
Content marketing agencies with enterprise clients have to deliver value to secure and keep their business. This often happens through demonstrating a thorough understanding of what's working and not with their businesses. Collections of data don’t provide much basis for actionable insights without proper consolidation into custom reports and custom dashboards.
Klipfolio is a tool for agencies that need to provide easy-to-interpret, consolidated metrics. The powerful platform uses data sources in the cloud to create user-friendly information, including marketing KPIs. Klipfolio aims to provide a business with self-serve metrics that can help with strategy planning.
9. Looker Studio: Provides Seamless Data Visualization and Interactive Dashboards
Most people are visual learners, which means even the smallest numbers written in the clearest form won’t be as effective as a pie chart. People often need to see data graphically to absorb its relevance and business meaning. Visuals also help business leaders overcome the hurdle of the short attention span so people can quickly get the main message of what might otherwise be a complex compilation of data.
Looker Studio is another Google product tool that allows you to quickly and easily convert content marketing metrics and other data into attractive designs. Looker Studio has the added advantage of being interactive, so users can modify filters and date range controls as necessary to understand what the numbers mean and where they might be going.
10. Whatagraph: Offers Functional Reports From Different Data Sources
The multitude of tools you use in your content marketing efforts might all provide some benefit, but it’s difficult to arrive at a comprehensive picture when your data is scattered across various solutions. Some of the most vital platforms for your business might be third-party apps like Instagram or Facebook Ads. However, each of those platforms offers just one subset of a very large and complex puzzle.
Whatagraph integrates all of these data sources into one comprehensive, easy-to-navigate solution. The tool achieves this feat without the extra hassle of third-party connectors, so you can easily track content performance and ROI and report your results. The tool also allows you to create data visualizations and share them with team members for in-depth discussions.
11. Tableau: Provides Collaborative Features To Analyze KPIs
People can often feel isolated in their data-driven content marketing journey without the support and resources that come with a professional community. Those communities provide essential information about how to use technology to maximum effect and offer examples of who’s doing it right.
The collaborative nature of Tableau is one element that sets it apart. The tool is a leading analytics platform that focuses on data management and governance. It comes built with Salesforce’s Einstein tool, an AI-driven technology that supports the effective use of your own data. Tableau allows you to analyze KPIs so you have the data you need to make great decisions about your content marketing efforts.
12. AgencyAnalytics: Implements Reporting Automation
Content marketers who work for agencies have a particular need when it comes to data: They must be able to integrate and understand data and transform it into reports for clients. Those clients might rely on digital marketing strategies to build and scale their businesses, but they should leave it to the content marketers to do the on-the-ground work of developing, executing, and monitoring the success of digital campaigns.
AgencyAnalytics is a solution for these pain points that content marketing agencies experience. There’s no need to create manual client reports with a purely automated, seamless approach. One particularly nice feature of AgencyAnalytics is its “white label” nature. You can add your agency’s own logo and branding to the AgencyAnalytics reports to ensure consistency with all your other client communications.
13. Wordsmith: Turns Data Into Written Reports
Most people think of one of a few things when they hear the word data: numbers, images of pie charts, tables, or even lines of code against a black computer screen.
It often requires a leap to think of data as the source of actionable insight that business leaders can use to improve or further develop their content marketing strategies.
Instead of relying on your team members’ amenity to numbers, you can use a tool that translates your data into something that’s a bit more universally palatable: words. The platform Wordsmith by Automated Insights helps you analyze your data and translate it into narrative. You can use the narrative as-is or as a draft for the next presentation you have to make to discuss your company’s latest digital marketing strategies.
Final Thoughts
Marketing reporting tools help content marketers do the best work for the digital campaigns they devise and manage. They help you to move beyond just writing great content towards analyzing how that content fares in the cluttered and often complex world of online information. With the right tools, you and your companies transform how you use data and reporting to transform data into actionable insights.
