营销Monitoring vs. Marketing Reporting: What Is More Important?

Imagine you’re still in school. Your essays, homework, and quizzes tell you how you’re doing in real-time, and if you’re not happy, you still have time to change something in your study system and improve your grades.

But after you get your final grade on your final exam, you can only look back on your whole performance and try to draw conclusions – what did you do well? How can you do better next time?

在营销监控与报告时，情况类似。

您是否会确定每天在社交媒体或Google广告上进行检查？还是您会让您的广告系列完成，然后分析它以查看下次可以改进的内容？或两者？

Both monitoring and reporting have their pros and cons, so we asked 30+ marketing experts to share their experiences with us.

哪个胜过另一个？对于出色的结果，它们同样重要吗？

Let’s dive in.

• What Is Marketing Monitoring?
• What Is Marketing Reporting?
• Monitoring vs. Reporting: Differences and Similarities
• When Is Marketing Monitoring More Important?
• When Is Marketing Reporting More Important?
• 基于监控的报告最佳

What Is Marketing Monitoring?

营销monitoring revolves around tracking your current marketing activities to find out if your campaign is indeed achieving the desired goals.

在此过程中，您可能会发现您的某些活动带来了出色的结果，因此您可能会增加预算。另一方面，您可能会注意到特定的广告并不像您想象的那样成功，因此您可以暂停或修改它们。

What Is Marketing Reporting?

When your marketing campaigns or other activities are finished, or at the end of a specific time period (for example, year’s quarter), you may put together a report to analyze the results you’ve achieved.

您通常会向公司的利益相关者报告您的进度，并向他们提供营销活动的投资回报率，以及有关如何获得更好结果的可行计划。

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Monitoring vs. Reporting: Differences and Similarities

尽管您正在使用相同的数据，但监视过程和报告您的营销活动aren’t the same.

First of all, marketing monitoring happens more often. Some marketers do it daily, while others even check on their marketing campaigns several times a day.

我们的一项调查中的回答非常有趣：

• Around 50% of respondents monitor their YouTube ads multiple times a day.
• Most people don’t monitor their SEO efforts or they do it on a weekly basis.
• 超过30％的参与者表示他们每天监视其Google广告。但是每天有几次显示器显示广告。
• 大约有40％的人每天几次监视其LinkedIn广告。
• 大多数受访者不会监视他们的社交媒体运动，否则他们每周都会进行。
• 最后，我们的大多数受访者每天监视会员营销活动几次。

另一方面，营销报告通常是每周，每月，每季度或每周写的。您将收集到此时间范围内收集的数据提取并向客户或经理报告。

So, how often do marketers report on their marketing efforts? The responses we got here were also interesting:

• 我们几乎有40％的受访者每周在Facebook广告上报告。Instagram广告也是如此。
• More than 40% of the marketers we surveyed report on Google ads and display ads on a monthly basis.
• Most people don’t monitor LinkedIn ads or do it on a monthly basis. And the same goes for YouTube ads.
• Most of our survey participants report on email marketing on a monthly basis, while they report on SEO and social media campaigns even up to several times a day.
• Lastly, most people report on their affiliate marketing campaigns on a weekly basis, or don’t report on them at all.

Most of our respondents claim they create up to five reports a month – 20% of them write no more than three, while around 55% of marketers create three to five monthly marketing reports.

And does reporting take up a lot of your time?

The participants in this Databox study (around 38%) said they usually don’t need more than an hour to compile the report, while over 20% of people use automation tools to create them.

让我们回到这两个活动之间的差异。当您监视营销工作时，您将有机会在旅途中进行调整 - 当您的广告活动仍在运行时。您可以测试不同的解决方案，并查看哪些解决方案为您带来更好的结果。

But once your campaign is done and you create a report, you can’t go back and change it – you’re reporting past activities.

Another difference is that you may use different tools for these two activities. Our survey has shown that 24% of respondents use one set of tools to monitor their marketing activities, while they use different ones for reporting.

尽管存在差异，但营销监控和营销报告有一个关键的共同点：它们的目标是帮助您了解您的努力与受众的共鸣程度以及将来可以做些什么可以做些什么。

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但是你怎么知道当优先?一些times, you simply need to choose where you’re going to allocate your time and energy. To help you make this decision more easily, we asked over 30 marketing experts what their best practices are and what they consider more important.

Let’s dig deeper into the importance of marketing monitoring and marketing reporting.

When Is Marketing Monitoring More Important?

Many marketing experts will confirm that marketing monitoring and reporting are equally important. However, here are a few situations when monitoring may play a more essential role.

1. When You Have a Small Team and Limited Budget
2. When You Want Better Control Over Your Accounts
3. When You Want to Understand Your Marketing Reports Better
4. When You Want to Monitor Your Competitors
5. 当您想识别数据趋势并将其用于未来策略

1. When You Have a Small Team and Limited Budget

罗汉·卡达姆（Rohan Kadam）骑自行车知道如何说，当您经营一家小型企业时，营销监控可能更重要，并且需要确保尽可能高效地花钱。

“我与一支小型团队一起工作。由于我的业务规模很小，因此监视我的营销工作非常重要，以确保我有效地支出。Kadam说，我的整个重点一直在确保我的营销努力获得最大的收益。

“I use Ahrefs to monitor my SEO efforts and I use Google Ads and Facebook Ads platform to monitor my SEM efforts. The best part of using these tools is that they help me make informed decisions when it comes to my marketing.”

卡丹并不是唯一有这种意见的人。“我认为我的工作中最有益的是什么，对于较小的中型公司来说，最有益的是营销监控，”有色科学。

“监视您的广告系列非常重要，因为您正在获取有关在广告系列中成功运行的内容，收入多少转换以及正在生成的点击的实时信息。对于较小的预算，这可以有助于防止您的大部分竞选预算浪费。如果您在广告系列中进行了A/B测试，这也可以帮助您更明确地了解将来的活动中的内容。”

2.当您想要更好地控制帐户时

When you’re reporting on your marketing activities, you’re not looking at your data in real-time. If you’re not monitoring your campaigns, you may miss a chance to fix something that could have saved your money or brought you better results.

“Marketing monitoring is an ongoing process that allows you to assess the minor details in your marketing strategy, evaluate your performance live rather than later in time, and make small-scale changes based on sudden trends; all that was just mentioned ensure that your set plans will work wonderfully,” saysInfotracer’s Ben Hartwig.

“I believe marketing monitoring is a tad more important for the control it gives you to do on-the-spot adjustments and avoid any issues before it is too late.”

Alistair DoddsEver Increasing Circlesagrees that monitoring is the only way to notice sudden spikes or drops in your data in real-time. “We monitor our accounts on a daily basis in case of any sudden changes in performance. That’s not to say we’ll take action unless there’s something serious in play as you generally want to see how trends and patterns evolve before taking action. But monitoring for any sudden spikes or cliff edge falls is important for overall account performance.”

Vickie Pierre ofSR22InsuruanceQuotes.org补充说，当您对广告系列的不同版本进行分拆时，立即采取行动尤为重要。皮埃尔说：“这很简单。”“当您定期监视营销工作时，您对您的努力是向后还是向前移动。更重要的是，如果您是A/B测试，则可以以最新的方式评估成功并进行调整，而不是等到结束。”

Pierre also gives an imaginative example that perfectly reflects the importance of marketing monitoring: “Imagine a racecar driver who waits until the very end of a race to make adjustments to his vehicle, when he could’ve easily addressed key issues in a quick pit stop? The same is true with marketing monitoring. It gives you an opportunity to respond right away. And when it’s all said and done, that immediate attention can result in saved time, resources, and financial outcomes.”

3.当您想更好地了解营销报告时

Connor Hewson ofAssured Marketing相信你的营销报告中的数据ways more informative if you’ve been monitoring your campaigns before they ended.

“I will always place a slight emphasis on the monitoring of marketing campaigns rather than the reporting”, explains Hewson. “The reason for this is simply down to the fact that if monitoring is not given enough attention then when generating reports the information listed on them will always be less informative. When monitoring marketing campaigns it is vital that KPI’S and other factors are given close attention. Whether the campaign’s budget is small or large, the only way to ensure that it is being spent effectively is through successful monitoring of the campaign’s progress.”

And it’s true – there isn’t much to report on unless you’re monitoring your campaigns since the beginning. “I would go with marketing monitoring because I think it is inclusive of reporting. You see, as a marketer who has to market her own business and those of my many clients, I have to be very strategic in every that I do, especially when dealing with small businesses that have limited resources (time and money)” says Kennette Burgess ofFOCUS Marketing＆Development Solutions，Inc。

“As a strategist, if I am monitoring my marketing to maximize the effectiveness of a business or campaign and increase sales/awareness, then I am reviewing analytics, reports, industry trends, competitors, ensuring my competitive advantage is still being delivered, etc. I am ensuring I reach my or my client’s goals for that campaign or project by monitoring all of these things. I have to monitor and analyze before I can report back to my clients”, explains Burgess.

4. When You Want to Monitor Your Competitors

阿丽娜·克拉克（Alina Clark）CocoDoc说，如果您想随时改善自己的产品和服务，那么了解竞争对手的工作很重要。“在业务中，成功的真正考验是您如何处理竞争能力，以及您是否可以提供比竞争更多的东西。

作为SaaS提供商，我们在营销监控方面进行了很多投资，因为我们需要知道竞争对手在做什么。营销监控有助于我们收集有关潜在客户的见解和数据，以及如何改善我们的产品以吸引更多客户。”

5. When You Want to Identify Data Trends and Use Them for Future Strategy

营销monitoring is also a faster way to learn if there are trends in your data that you can use to improve your future marketing strategy.

Nelson Sherwin ofPEO Companies解释道:“营销监控更多的进口ant to us than marketing reporting, as that’s how we collect data regarding our current marketing habits and create new strategies for the future. Reports give us a good indication of where we are and where we need to be, but monitoring allows us to investigate why certain trends are happening and what we can do to step up our game.”

When Is Marketing Reporting More Important?

其他参与的营销专业人士our study claimed that reporting was more important for executing successful marketing strategies.

Nathan Sebastian ofGoodFirmseven says ”the primary reason is that the marketing reports will always be the core of all marketing strategies. A marketing report gives a bird’s eye view of what is working for the business and what is not.”

In what situations does marketing reporting carry more weight than monitoring?

1. When You Want to Understand How Your Business Is Performing
2. When You Want to Create Forecasts
3. When You Want to Spend Less Time on Daily Monitoring
4. When You Need to Justify Your Marketing Budget
5. When You Want to Make a Data-Driven Decision

1. When You Want to Understand How Your Business Is Performing

To truly understand how your business is doing, where your expenses are at, and what you should plan for the future, you need to analyze your marketing reports, says Eden Cheng ofPeopleFinderFree。

“为了成功实现您的业务目标，您应该彻底研究和研究营销报告，因为这将使您对业务的表现有很好的了解。报告提供了有关公司支出，增长和利润的有用见解，这将有助于确定未来的项目，预算和营销计划。它还突出了该公司面临的当前问题，并可能提出解决方案的方法。”

Emily Perez of厨房无限believes reporting helps us evaluate the performance of each strategy we implement and find what’s working more easily. “After investing in different marketing strategies that companies feel are effective, marketing reporting helps businesses track and monitor the performance of each marketing strategy they implement. As a result, it will be easy to identify which methods are working and the ones that are not producing the desired results. Marketing monitoring is simply about checking the performances of marketing strategies without any follow-up actions in mind.”

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2. When You Want to Create Forecasts

Cheng also mentions that marketing reporting “can also identify new growth opportunities for the company to expand and set future goals.”

Andre OentoroMilkwhaleagrees: “By reporting, you can read the results and create a forecast for the future. Marketing reporting will also show you how your marketing effort is doing as a whole picture, so you can truly pinpoint what you need to do and what you need to improve. Simply monitoring only tackles minor issues at hand whereas reporting shows you the problem and what you need to do as a whole.”

3.当您想花费更少的时间进行日常监控时

Accurate reports may sometimes save your time. You don’t need to spend many hours a week on marketing monitoring if you can ensure the accuracy of your marketing reports. You can do that by using high-quality tools.

Zarina Bahadur of123 Baby Boxsays: “Marketing reporting is more important because if the reports are accurate, one may not need to monitor that frequently. So it is best to have precise marketing reports. It will help in marketing monitoring a lot!”

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4. When You Need to Justify Your Marketing Budget

有时，您的客户会想确切地知道他们在投资的内容以及为什么要运行特定的广告或从事其他营销活动。Creating a marketing report for your clientcan help you explain your strategy and results, and put an emphasis on your accomplishments while providing your clients or managers with clear and digestible information about spending and ROI.

Sai Blackbyrn教练claims that “marketing reporting helps us make sense of all the data generated through promotional activities. These data-driven insights are what we use to inform decision-makers about budgets and KPIs. These reports also help justify marketing efforts and spend because they provide a holistic view of the impact of each marketing strategy that we are using.”

5. When You Want to Make a Data-Driven Decision

“It doesn’t matter how experienced or intuitive a marketer is.” says GoodFirms’ Nathan Sebastian. “The intuitions and expertise will only help the business to a certain extent. Every marketer will need solid data to back their solid theories. Marketing reporting will help get exactly that.”

According to Sebastian, you can pull data from your report that can help you in many aspects of your marketing efforts. First of all, you will learn more about your customer journey and identify where they may be issues. Additionally, this data will enable your marketing and sales teams to align and optimize data flow so everyone can take the necessary actions to improve the overall strategy. All of which can have an incredibly positive impact on your revenue.

It’s hard to make sense of all the data you’re collecting without creating a report to gather them all in one place in a clear, visualized way, agrees Karol Nowacki ofTidio。“Marketing reporting helps us to connect all crucial dots.” says Nowacki and adds:

“Based on reports, we can discuss whether the marketing strategies we currently use are going in the right direction and what improvements should be made to achieve our business goals. In my opinion, marketing monitoring without reporting can be just a bunch of abstract information, difficult to understand and draw conclusions from.”

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基于监控的报告最佳

Many experts agree that you may get the best results by combining marketing monitoring and reporting. Each activity has its own purpose and benefits, so why not take the best of both worlds?

Ashley Cummings ofSearchlight Content LLC说：“如果您不监视营销工作，那么您将没有太多报告。如果您不发送报告，那么您的团队将不知道有效的是什么，什么行不通以及需要进行什么调整。我认为最好的方法是一种数据仪表板工具，该工具可以自动化监视和报告过程。这样，您可以轻松地保留所有广告系列。”

So, one simply doesn’t go without the other. Jeff Baker of布拉夫顿同意：“我相信营销监控应该为营销报告提供信息。理想情况下，监视您的正确KPI营销仪表板should result in commercially relevant insights in your marketing reporting.”

Miranda Yan ofVinPitexplains why each of these activities are critical for your business:

“On the one hand, monitoring lets you know about the changes and ongoing trends in the market; on the other, reporting tells whether your strategies are efficient enough to deal with the fluctuations or not.

Since our company makes use of strategic KPIs the most and focuses on long-term goals, marketing reporting is something that we can’t do without. A marketing report lets us know about the betterments we need to implement to continue reaping fruitful results and realize the mistakes we have been making, as it’s a report formulated after observing operations over a longer time span. It provides us with a bigger and clearer picture of our working model and the success rate of our strategies.”

Ted Capwell ofSafe Trade Binary Optionsadds that keeping tabs on both marketing monitoring and reporting makes your business look serious, regardless of what your clients may require.

“在谈论业务时，两者都是必要的，因为某些客户只需要业务，而某些客户则需要业务以及报告。而且我相信，作为一名专业人员，您需要专注于营销监控和营销报告，不仅是为客户提供的，而且要使业务视角看起来像或在客户中表现出专业精神，这是必要的。”

Our final conclusion may be the following: use marketing monitoring for your day-to-day business and create effective and accurate marketing reports that you’ll be able to understand, present, and act on.

“多亏了Google Analytics（分析）或AHREFS等工具，我们可以在此过程中查看如何定期执行并调整营销活动。营销监控有助于我们实现短期和长期目标，并遵循任何市场或行业的变化。”LiveCareer。

“但是，营销报告使我们有机会衡量我们的进步，从错误中学习，并确保我们坚持一般的营销策略。营销报告对于我们的管理和利益相关者也是必不可少的。通过展示我们的工作以及每个季度的表现，我们的营销团队可以从我们部门以外的人那里获得反馈和灵感。这样，我们可以改善营销工作，并为公司的总体成功做出贡献。”

Maximize Your Strategy with the Best of Both Worlds

As you’ve seen, both marketing monitoring and reporting play a significant role in the successful implementation of your marketing strategy. Monitoring gives you a chance to react as soon as you notice an issue or sudden drop in traffic, social media activity, etc., and is more important for your day-to-day marketing tasks.

On the other hand, without a proper marketing report, you can’t understand the whole picture and see how these changes and improvements you’ve made affect your overall success. Reports can also be crucial if you’re performing marketing campaigns for clients or to justify your spending to the stakeholders.

What’s going to be more important for your business? We trust you won’t have a hard time making that decision after reading these tips from experienced marketing professionals.