How To Create a Lead Generation Report

Your marketing teams work hard to drive revenue into the company. They might celebrate when there's an influx of new leads. But which of those leads actually translate into sales? 

If the star of your team brings in that unicorn client that balloons your bottom line, do you know how they found that valuable asset? Can they repeat that success and find other dream customers?

Lead generation reports help marketing teams to visualize the success and failures of their strategies. These valuable documents offer insight about which marketing efforts to pivot toward in the future and which might be better left behind.

Putting together a thorough and comprehensive lead gen report allows you to see exactly how that unicorn was caught — and how you can find more customers just like them. 

What Is the Purpose of a Lead Gen Report?

Company leadership is often preoccupied with sales and revenue generation. These activities are essential for a healthy corporate outlook, but only represent the final stage of a multi-faceted marketing and sales strategy.

A lead generation report is a tool to measure the success of your efforts. It shows where your leads come from and what components of your marketing strategy have been most effective.

Lead generation reporting is critical for any successful marketing team. When done right, it:

• lets you know if you have reached your target audience
• shows you how to shift gears to find your potential customers 
• includes actionable insights on how to modify your lead generation strategies for maximum return
• gives your teams a starting point for discussion about whether your marketing is meeting its goals

The result should be not only more effective lead generation efforts, but more economical use of marketing budgets. 

To create a lead generation report that offers your team useful insights and analysis, there are a few key steps you'll want to follow.

5 Steps To Create an Effective Report for Lead Generation

Awesome lead generation reports require both clarity and detail. Your team should be able to understand the main takeaways at a glance, as well as delve deep into the important ideas for guidance on strategy and execution.

Here are the steps to creating a report that gives your marketing team the tools they need to succeed. 

1. Define Your Marketing Goals and KPIs

As you prepare to create a report, break down your lead generation metrics. These metrics are the precise measurements you use to help understand what’s working in your lead generation strategy. The metrics you choose to focus on will depend on your overall marketing goals.

First, consider which goals your team has been working toward in their marketing efforts. Are they striving to increase web traffic? Expand subscription lists? Grow product queries? Identifying the campaign's goals will help you decide which KPIs are most relevant.

Some KPIs you might want to consider tracking include:

• Page views (especially on lead generation landing pages)
• Completed sign-up forms
• Downloads of white papers or product info sheets

You can then compare these KPIs to other essential metrics such as sales, revenue, and conversions.

For example, your lead generation report can include not only the number of white paper downloads, but the percentage of people who both downloaded info and had an interaction with a sales agent about the next steps.

After all, at the end of the day, your goals for organic lead generation should be to close the deal. Your team can be more confident in their future efforts when they know whether an uptick in views resulted in more conversions.

2. Select the Right Tools and Data Sources

Your team will need a variety of tools to optimize its marketing efforts, and choosing the right ones can make or break a campaign.

Decide in advance which tools you want to use to measure and report your key metrics and KPIs. Keep in mind that you'll likely need a combination of tools to support all your marketing needs.

For example, you might use Google Analytics to measure page views or CRM software to track lead interactions with members of your sales teams. If you use email marketing, the platform that supports these efforts likely provides essential analytics you can use to track lead generation.

It’s important for these tools to be reliable and consistent. Your marketing team should also understand what the KPIs mean in a specific tool, as this can change from iteration to iteration of the software.

Previous versions of Google Analytics, for example, measured “average time on page” as a metric. In Google Analytics 4, however, the metric is “average engagement time,” which captures the time spent on the last page in a session.

3. Organize Your Data To Answer Key Questions

A lead generation report offers a snapshot of the results of your content marketing efforts. This snapshot should be specific to the sales qualified leads that your efforts were able to capture.

Detail is essential here, so that your marketing and sales teams can know at a glance the who, what, and where of your lead generation results.

Who: Include Demographics and Psychographics

The “who” of your lead generation report encompasses the different attributes of the audience your content optimization has helped you to reach.

There are two primary components to “who”: demographics and psychographics. Your lead generation tools should aim to include both in the profile of your target consumer.

• Demographics are details such as age, location, income, and language of your leads 
• Psychographics are details about the beliefs, values, and goals of your leads

Although most marketers understand demographics, psychographics can be trickier to define and identify.

As a brand, the pain point you’re trying to solve might be in part defined by the psychographics of your potential customer. Say you’ve created an on-the-go healthy snack pack for school-aged children. Your customer’s demographics might be young parents; the psychographics might be those parents who prioritize healthy eating but don’t have time to prepare meals for their kids.

In your lead generation report, your “who” should ideally highlight how effective your digital and email marketing efforts have been at reaching leads with your chosen demographics and psychographics. 

What: Analyze Leads Generated and Conversion Rates

The “what” of your lead generation report looks not only at leads, but how they interacted with your brand. Analyze the actions they took on your digital assets. This is especially important if they had sequential options to engage more deeply with your product offerings.

For example, in an email marketing campaign you might compare open rates to click through rates. By looking at which actions led your audience moving to the next step of the sales funnel, you know which messages are most effective and which leads are most likely to convert.

Where: Identify Top-Performing Marketing Channels

A lead generation campaign typically involves several digital marketing channels. Your report should break down the results channel by channel.

You’ll likely see that some channels, such as specific social media platforms, drive more high-quality leads than others. Be sure to match your chosen metrics and KPIs with each channel.

For example, you might get the highest engagement on Instagram, but the largest conversion into sales through email marketing.

4. Use Visualization Tools and Highlight Your Achievements

Your lead generation report should be easy to understand at a glance. Make full use of tables, graphs, and charts to drive home your message.

A text-only explanation can only go so far to represent your achievements. Stating that your page views have increased to 130,000 daily from 100,000 daily sounds moderately impressive, but a bar graph can clearly show the relative increase those figures represent. 

5. Provide Insights Into How To Optimize Lead Gen Efforts

Ultimately, your lead generation report should illuminate your next steps. It should give you insights about:

• which channels to focus on
• the success of your landing page optimization
• the most effective conversion strategies

That might mean developing a comprehensive report that outlines concrete projects and tasks for teams to take on next. Or, it could be a starting point for discussion among your marketing and sales teams. 

Either way, you'll want to highlight where your marketing efforts are underperforming and where they're hitting the mark. This can help your team conserve time, money, and creative energy by pivoting toward what's working and phasing out systems that aren't offering value to you or your customers.

Key Takeaways

A lead generation report gives you the chance to assess the return on investment of your digital marketing efforts. By demonstrating which marketing channels and marketing activities have resulted in the most high-quality leads, this report offers a roadmap for the next phase of your lead generation strategy.

Your lead generation report should include your chosen goals, metrics, demographics, psychographics, and marketing channel analysis. The most effective reports include charts and graphs to help readers to visualize and easily interpret the data.

With this understanding in hand, your marketing teams can take the next steps to strengthen and expand your lead generation campaigns.