There are plenty of downloadable monthly client report templates in the form of PowerPoint files, PDFs, and even JPG image files, that are available for free. In fact, we have our own free report template that we share in-depth below. And, if you're a small agency or a freelance consultant with just a few clients, downloading a basic template and customizing it every month to make reports may work.
However, for a large agency with dozens or hundreds of clients, manually creating charts and graphs and manually updating a reporting template every month for every client is a tremendous resource drain.
An automated software tool that allows you to report on all your clients' marketing data at scale would be the better option for you. In this post, we'll explain why.
Specifically, we'll cover:
- Our free Google Slides (or PowerPoint) template for PPC and Social Media monthly client reporting.
- The limitations of monthly client report templates for large agencies.
- How the TapClicks software tool helps enterprise agencies create monthly client reports automatically and at scale.
If you're a large or enterprise-level agency that would benefit from client report templates that automatically update every month, and in real-time, you can try our free 14-day trial or schedule a demo.
How to Use Our Free TapClicks Reporting Template
We've created a free report template which is available as a Google Presentation.
Simply make a copy of the slides in Google slides, or download them as a PowerPoint or PDF, and then edit them as you wish.
There are nine slides and all are templates with a clean, modern, readable design that you can adapt to whatever marketing campaign you are working on (e.g. PPC, Social Media, eCommerce).
Each slide helps you organize important metrics(e.g. campaign performance and engagement)and you can duplicate as needed.
Depending on which campaign you are focusing on, you can insert your data in your copy and create a report for your clients, team members or internal stakeholders.
Text areas are provided on the slides so you can add context to the data you're showing.
Below, we'll take a look at how a couple of our free template slides can be adapted for PPC and Social Media.
PPC
The slide above is designed to show key metrics of a PPC campaign at the top.
For example, you can always customize ad spend, impressions, clicks, and CTR (click-through rate). These four key metrics, along with return on ad spend (ROAS), make sense to report on for your campaigns.
Below those metrics, you can show data in various graphs, such as metrics over time and a conversion funnel.
Below, our template for engagement performance allows you to highlight one key metric along side other graphical breakdowns.
If you're interested in client report templates for PPC, you can read our full article on that template with additional slide concepts and layouts for PPC reporting here:
How to Improve Your PPCReporting Process (With Free PPC Report Template)
Social Media
The slide above is designed to show you two graphs side-by-side.
In this case, a pie chart and a bar graph show how much budget has been spent on different social media channels versus the clicks per week. You can include whatever social media metrics are relevant to you.
For example, you might want to view cost per conversion for a specific social media campaign versus the number of impressions across a week. Or, you could use the template below to show three different graphs of engagement metrics:
If you're interested in client report templates for social media, you can read our full article on that template here:
How to Improve Your Social Media Reports(+ A Free Social Media Report TemplatePDF)
Additional Reporting Template Slides
Our free template also includes slides where you can show metrics and include an optional text summary:
And there is also a slide where you can just include metrics:
Limitations of Downloadable Report Templates
Free, downloadable report templates are ideal if you only need to produce a handful of monthly reports for your clients.
You can download the free template and fill it in, and if you need to use it for more than one digital marketing campaign or client, you can make a customized version using the same template.
Using templates like this will help make your agency's reporting more visually consistent, on-brand, and clear.
But, once your volume of campaigns and clients reaches a certain level, using a free template becomes inefficient.
Completing each template is a manual, repetitive, and hugely time-consuming process.
For every single report, you need to manually download the data from each data source (e.g. Facebook Ads or Google Ads). You also need to ensure that your data sources have the latest updates so you would need to check these manually each month.
Then you need to consolidate that data into your template so you can manipulate it to show what you need. This might include combining it with data from another source, which you would need to download separately.
Then, you need to spend time making it look good for each report that you produce. And, you need to customize your template every time you start working on a new campaign or with a new client.
If you need to produce reports for different audiences, these need to be created manually. Likewise, ad hoc reports need to be created individually and sometimes at the last minute.
Because a free template is a download, all this work needs to be done every single month for every campaign and client.
This is extremely inefficient, yet many enterprise agencies operate like this and their staff is using up large chunks of time every month doing these tasks.
We've heard of agencies where a whole week each month or each quarter is largely spent pulling together client reports. Account managers and other staff barely do anything else during that week.
The cost of doing all this is extensive and significantly limits the time that could (and should) be spent on other tasks, such as actually improving and implementing marketing strategies for clients.
We explain below how TapClicks can bypass all these laborious steps and help marketers who need automation and scalability.
How TapClicks Automatically Fills in Report Templates, Saving Massive Time for Large Agencies
With TapClicks, your marketing team doesn't have to waste time filling in free templates because our software can do it for you.
Using our pre-designed templates, you can easily setup whatever calculations you want.
TapClicks connects to all of your marketing platforms to continuously pull data from your campaigns in real-time (via a live dashboard).
Your data will always be displayed in the original format you arranged.
In this way, TapClicks is like a monthly client report template that automatically fills itself in every month.
You don't have to spend hours, days, or weeks building monthly reports or any other kinds of reports for your clients (e.g, annual reports, sales reports, project status reports, SEO reports).
With TapClicks you can:
- Instantly access 250+ live advertising and marketing platforms including Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
- Use live dashboards that automate and scale.
- Automate everything including data manipulation and transformation.
- Create and automate reports with ReportStudio.
Below, we'll discuss each of these features with examples.
Instantly Access Data from 250+ Advertising and Marketing Platforms (Like Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, and More)
With TapClicks, you can connect to more than 250 marketing-specific Smart Connectors' including all the leading marketing platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, etc.
We can also connect to many lesser-known media buying and ad platforms (e.g. Genius Monkey, Tiger Pistol, Verve). And, if there's an obscure platform that we don't have a connector for, the TapClicks team can often set this up for you so that you can access your data.
TapClicks automatically pulls in data from wherever it's needed in real-time without you needing to do anything. And the first time you set it up, we can pull in 12 months of historical data, so you can incorporate it into your reports immediately.
The other time saver is that the platform connectors are managed by the TapClicks team and are always up-to-date so you don't need to update them yourself manually (for example, if Facebook updates their API, we'll handle that update on our end, your developer and IT team don't have to worry about it).
Use Live Dashboards That Automate and Scale
Reports are, by definition, periodic (monthly, quarterly, etc.) because they typically need to be created by a person every time.
But since TapClicks connects to your marketing platform and pulls the data and plots it or visualizes it itself, with software, the data in your report templates can be kept up to date all the time.
This means agencies may not even need to create a monthly report because the latest information is always there on the client's live dashboard, configured exactly as you want it, and easily accessible to you and your clients at any time.
You can, however, generate reports to send to clients monthly, quarterly, or whenever.
You can use our ready-made templates for PPC, social media marketing channels, ad networks, and email campaigns to create your client dashboards. Once you've set them up, which is super-easy to do, they will automatically be updated so you won't need to do any manual tasks at all.
Customize Your Dashboards
With TapClicks you can customize everything to suit you. Customize multiple dashboards down to the specific metrics of each chart and table (referred to as "widgets" in TapClicks), and create templates around these.
This allows you to scale customizations across many clients. For example, you can customize a dashboard with custom widgets for Facebook Ads and use this across multiple clients without having to update each one individually, which saves you a huge amount of time.
Note: You can also just customize one dashboard and not have those changes applied to all dashboards.
If there is an update to a dashboard, you can apply that across all your dashboards for all your clients without having to update each one individually. If you were using a free template, you would have to go into each template for each client to do this.
Finally, there are no limits on how many clients or campaigns you can manage with TapClicks and these can be managed all from one place. You can also group several accounts and view them under one client.
Grant Access to Your Clients
To save you distributing reports to your clients, with TapClicks you can grant clients access to their dashboards so they can access live data whenever they want.
And for some clients, if they are happy to go and check the dashboards for themselves, this may mean they don't request monthly reports at all. This would completely remove the need for a monthly client report template.
You have control over who sees what as you can set up individual permissions at the widget level so different stakeholders can view what they need to see. This would mean no last-minute or custom report requests, saving even more time.
Automate Everything Including Data Manipulation and Transformation
While free downloads provide you with a placeholder to copy and paste your data into your slides, if you want to transform that data (i.e. change the format, structure or value of that data) it would have to be done separately and would involve many hours of painstaking work.
For example, if you wanted to standardize names (e.g. different terms might be used in different data sets: imp, impression, etc.) with a free template, you would have to go through all your data sets and manually amend those terms.
With TapClicks, you can easily standardize data sets so that metrics that mean the same thing can have one label (e.g. impression).
This makes it much easier to perform omnichannel data analysis, as well as tell clear, coherent stories to clients that they can easily understand.
Likewise, you probably won't want to show your clients your mark-up costs. With a free template, you would add these figures manually. With TapClicks, there is a function that you can apply to all your client costs, which could, for example, add a 20% mark-up automatically.
You could do this across all your dashboards and clients or you could set each one at a different mark-up, if you wish.
Finally, TapClicks also allows you to set up data manipulation or transformation rules when you first set up your dashboards or reports.
So for example, if you have a section showing campaign metrics across 15 different campaigns that involve adding up spend across all those campaigns, you can set up that calculation once in TapClicks and that visual (what we call a widget) will always show that sum total spend.
You don't have to manually add up the spend across those 15 campaigns by hand every month and type it into a PowerPoint slide.
For example, the slide below shows a high-level view of two social media ad campaigns: Facebook and Instagram.
TapClicks ReportStudio(more on this below) allows you to blend all the data from two campaigns and then view the overall stats as you wish. And the template also allows you to include relevant visuals of the ads and explanatory text to contextualize your work.
The TapClicks free template also provides space to add text but this is not customizable and images cannot be included.
The key is that the numbers on the left will remain up to date at all times because TapClicks connects directly to your Facebook and Instagram accounts and pulls those numbers themselves. You will no longer have to add up the totals and type them into this report manually.
Create and Automate Reports with ReportStudio
You may decide that giving your clients access to the TapClicks live dashboard negates the need for producing monthly reports entirely, but many clients will still require monthly reports, particularly if they need to present that information to other stakeholders or want data presented in a certain way.
And, if you have multiple clients and a free report template is restrictive, you can create beautiful-looking reports with the TapClicks reporting tool, ReportStudio.
ReportStudio allows you to create and automate your monthly reports to whatever schedule you wish.
You can use one of our readymade marketing report templates or create your own with no limits on how they look. Reports can be sent out in all the main file types (PDF, PPT, and CSV).
You can see above that ReportStudio looks like a presentation deck (e.g. PowerPoint or Google Slides) but the key is ReportStudio is connected to your marketing data, so you don't have to manually plot the data.
Just like the TapClicks dashboards we discussed above, any graphs, charts, and visuals you create in ReportStudio automatically pulls data from the platforms you connect to and stays up to date in real-time available whenever you need to pull a report.
Instead of spending hours or days responding to a last-minute request and creating a report from scratch, you can create ad hoc reports within minutes and set them up to be automatically sent to your clients in whatever format you choose.
You can pull in whichever data you want from your monthly marketing activities and share it with clients and stakeholders.
Once created, data from your dashboards will automatically populate your report slides without you needing to do anything. You can create a master template for your reports that can be used across several campaigns or clients.
Our marketing report templates are white label, so you can customize them to fit in with your client's branding.
Examples of Templates in ReportStudio
PPC
Unlike a free template, using ReportStudio allows you to include whichever data you like and view that data in a variety of ways.
The slide below shows the KPIs versus the conversion rate over a week for a PPC campaign.
If you wanted, you could look at the data across different timescales and you could also add in data from other campaigns to see campaigns side by side.
The slide below shows a high level view of the performance of a PPC campaign across 10 months.
You can include as many metrics as you wish and show them as snapshots (as they are here) or as a graph or line chart.
This helps you and your clients get an overview of your marketing campaigns to make strategic decisions on what is and isn't working.
Social Media
The detailed report below shows the number of YouTube views broken down into various time metrics.
These different metrics and visuals are not something you could achieve within a free template report. However, TapClicks allows you to tailor your report to drill down into a high level of detail.
So, do you need to upgrade to an automated marketing reporting tool?
We've demonstrated that using downloadable free report templates (including our own) can be a good way for small agencies or freelance consultants to report on their marketing activities to clients. However, for enterprise agencies with dozens or hundreds of clients, using a template is limited.
For agencies with many clients wishing to save huge amounts of time, TapClicks provides the software solution that will create all your client marketing reports automatically and at scale.
Using such a tool saves hundreds of hours of work and will allow agency staff to spend their time on more valuable strategic tasks that will increase your company's ROI.
Are you ready to upgrade your reporting processes to spend more time on the work that matters most? Try our free 14-day trial.
