Plan, launch, report: How to create a campaign performance report

Social media campaigns are a chance to reach your target audience in a new way, create memorable content and impact top-line business goals. But with all the value they bring, managing campaigns comes with innate challenges, especially social media reporting.

Along with creating and scheduling social posts across multiple networks, marketers must track performance, campaign mentions and identify optimizations to improve the campaign. They must also create campaign performance reports and share insights to various stakeholders whether it’s their manager, a client or other marketers.

In this article, we’ll walk through how to create a campaign report that covers everything you need, and show you how a tool like Sprout can alleviate those challenges.

What is a campaign performance report?

A campaign performance report is a detailed analysis document that evaluates the effectiveness of coordinated marketing efforts for a social media campaign. It includes the key tactics and materials for promotion and tracks reach, engagement, conversions ‌and other relevant metrics to determine how well the campaign met its goals.

The purpose of a campaign report ‌is to provide insights that help marketers refine their strategies and make data-driven decisions. The benefits include improved campaign efficiency, better allocation of resources and enhanced ability to meet business goals.

How to create a campaign report

We’ve created this six-step guide to show you how to create a campaign report. We’ll also show you how using Sprout makes managing your marketing efforts easier and swifter.

1. Define performance metrics

Establishing clear key performance indicators (KPIs) is the bedrock for an effective campaign report, because it defines success. These can include metrics like reach, engagement rate, clicks and conversion rate. Consider what you’re trying to achieve and select KPIs that align with both your marketing campaign and business goals. For example, if your goal is brand awareness in a new market, your KPIs would include impressions and reach.

For a paid strategy, leadership will want to know how money was spent. Sprout’s Paid Performance Reports help track performance and inform budget decisions in real time for X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn campaigns. These digestible reports focus on the metrics that stakeholders care about most, such as cost per conversion, cost per click, total spend and more.

On the organic side, these reports help you share insights and collaborate with media buyers to improve both the paid and organic efforts of your campaign.

2. Determine key stakeholders

Figure out the key stakeholders you’ll be sharing insights with to set a firm foundation for your campaign performance report. Knowing your audience will help you understand their expectations and which information will be the most important to share. For example, a chief marketing officer might want an executive scorecard with a broad overview of key campaign milestones, while a social media manager might ask for a granular breakdown pointing out significant trends.

You’ll also need to define stakeholders to create your various workflows, especially approval workflows. This level of governance makes sure marketing leaders feel informed and confident about how social supports campaign goals. In Sprout’s Campaign Planner, you can see which of your campaign-related posts are out for approval—a good way to track content that still needs stakeholder review.

Along with message approvals, you can share campaign calendar views and campaign-specific reports with relevant stakeholders to keep them informed of content plans and overall performance.

3. Select a reporting tool

Managing a social media campaign with native tools is difficult, and manual reporting is an obstacle in of itself. Marketers are also challenged with measuring the return on investment (ROI) of social campaigns—that’s why having access to the right tools and infrastructure is a must-have.

Adopting a tool like Sprout centralizes your existing social publishing, customer care and reporting workflows. There are a lot of social media analytics tools to choose from like Google Analytics, Sendible and Keyhole, so do your due diligence to determine which platform will help you achieve your goals.

Consider robust tools that offer comprehensive tracking, analysis and data visualization. Tools that enable you to create or export data visualizations will help visualize the insights you share and make the data digestible. Even better, seek out tools that offer artificial intelligence (AI) and automation functionality to generate visuals and other tasks to save time and effort. Personalization is also important. For example, does the tool enable you to add in your metrics or create reports from scratch?

With Sprout’s Premium Analytics, you can use My Reports to tailor a report specific to your campaign. Build a report with custom report options to tell the unique story behind your campaign and clearly demonstrate success. Once you’ve drilled into the data that underscores the value of social, share it with your social team and beyond.

4. Build your campaign and analyze data

Once you select your tool of choice, you can start building your campaign and begin gathering data. With campaign management in Sprout, your posts are automatically incorporated into a tagging structure that organizes and tracks the success of your overall campaign and individual content.

In addition to tagging, Sprout users can add URL tracking to identify social referral traffic and conversions from social campaign posts in Google Analytics. Being intentional about your tagging and URL tracking at the start will help you later on when reporting results.

Sprout Campaigns enables you to manage complex campaigns whether they span multiple networks, various time periods, multiple KPIs or creative assets. Set the time frame of your campaign, which specific social accounts are applicable and maintain consistency with a campaign brief to level-set content expectations and goals for the team.

As you run your campaign, you can use the Campaign Planner to evaluate how your current content is performing, fill potential gaps and use additional tags to test and optimize your campaign.

5. Present results of your campaign

Create a detailed report that presents the collected data and analysis in a concise and actionable manner. Keep your key stakeholders in mind to make sure the report addresses their interests and concerns in an accessible format. With Sprout My Reports, you can create automated reports and schedule them for delivery via email. You can also export reports in real-time as a PDF or shared link.

While explaining your overall campaign performance is important, digging into your top and lowest performing is also valuable. Filter the Post Performance Report by your campaign to sort your content by your relevant KPIs. This will help you uncover themes around which posts performed well and which didn’t so you can optimize for future campaigns.

If you forgot to add posts to your campaign when initially scheduling, you can retroactively add tags in the Post Performance Report. Rather than adding posts individually to your campaign, users with Premium Analytics can tag them in bulk using the search and filter functionality to bring those posts to the forefront.

6. Optimize campaigns with real-time data and feedback

A campaign report isn’t a one-and-done situation—consistent management and optimization is required to maximize your impact. Analyze incoming data to assess how the campaign is performing against the set metrics. Look for trends, patterns and anomalies that can provide deeper insights into campaign effectiveness.

While SMMs don’t need to do a full-blown report on campaigns every day, they should keep an eye on performance to use insights gained from the analysis to refine and improve future campaigns. This could involve adjusting strategies, reallocating budgets‌ or experimenting with new tactics to enhance overall campaign performance.

For example, if you notice a post performing well, you can apply those insights to your future content and enhance your campaign in real-time. Perhaps a Facebook post resonates with your audience particularly well while another garners low impressions. With Sprout, you have the option to boost those posts directly in the platform. The Campaign Planner lets you quickly identify top-performing content during the campaign to help inform whether you should do a content pivot.

By following these steps, you can create a comprehensive campaign performance report that measures success and informs future marketing strategies.

Create your campaign performance report seamlessly

A strong campaign report can truly help nurture your campaigns, community and company goals. Sprout streamlines campaign management through a centralized platform where you can create content, analyze data and simplify reporting. By having everything in one place, you can spend less time reporting and more time on improving your campaign and taking care of your customers. Experience custom reporting by signing up for a demo of Sprout’s Premium Analytics.