How to Create Local Marketing Reports

For your digital marketing strategies, you probably use many local SEO tools such as Google my business, Moz, or other search engine marketing tools for local businesses. 

You're bringing new local searches, traffic and sales which is perfect, however this is just the first step. You also need to track all the data you get from those tools to be able to adjust your local advertising accordingly. 

And how can you do that? With a great local marketing report of course! 

Here's everything you need to know to create the perfect digital marketing report for your local business's needs!

What's a local marketing report?

A local marketing report, or local marketing dashboard is a tool that enables you to track all your local business marketing strategies with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) giving you insights into your business performance and enabling you to steer your local digital marketing strategies in the right direction.

Why create a local marketing report?

You can use a local marketing report to show your location managers the results of your marketing efforts, like leads, sales, etc. It can also be used by your marketing team to show your campaign results for each location to your boss (CMO, CEO, executive director, etc.). 

Local marketing reports enable you to show an overview of how the company as a whole is going, as well as a breakdown for each location.

You can demonstrate the value of your marketing efforts, the return on investment for each location, as well as the value of your corporate website or ads for all your locations.

Possibilities are pretty much endless, but in a nutshell, local marketing reports will help you demonstrate the value of your work to your boss or location managers.

What should you include in a local marketing report?

Usually, a local marketing report will include all the KPIs that are the most useful to your business, including your business listings data from local search tools and other marketing platforms such as:

• Social media networks (Facebook Ads, Insights, Instagram)
• Web analytics tools (Google Analytics, Google My Business)
• Phone call analytics (CallRail)
• SEO tools (SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs)

You can also include ecommerce metrics, content marketing metrics, pretty much anything you want. It really depends on what your digital marketing strategies are and what is important for your business to track.

What metrics should you track in your local marketing report? 

There are thousands of metrics you could track, so to help you out, we compiled some of the most popular KPIs you can track your local listings with:

Traffic from Google My Business

The total number of visitors brought by Google My Business to your website.

Phone calls per location

The number of phone calls each of your locations received. You can track this metric with a call tracking software such as Callrail

Best performing city

The city or location with the best performance (cost/conversion by city/region).

Local queries impressions and ranking

The impressions your local queries had in the last period of time in Google Search Console as a ranking.

Search brand or category

The number of times your business profile was shown when a user searched for your brand or a brand related to your business in Google My Business.

Sessions by landing page

If you have different landing pages for each of your locations, this metric will help you see the traffic coming from each of your locations’ ads.

Reviews

The reviews published on your business profile in Google My Business.

Leads by user type

This KPI lets you track how many leads you're getting (from a contact form on your website or newsletter signup, for example) from different users.

Session from organic over time

The amount of organic traffic your website has had over a given period of time. 

Channel performance

Learn which marketing channels are most successful at converting visitors to your website into paying customers.

Cost per leads

Make sure your marketing budget is being spent effectively - this KPI tells you how much you're spending per lead.

There are a lot more KPIs you can track depending on your own local marketing strategies, these are just some examples you can use.

For example, you could also track the number of new customers, the data from different phone numbers used by your small business, your search rankings, and way more! 

How to create local marketing reports in seconds

Tracking all these KPIs in a report can seem like a tedious task, if you have to go into each of your marketing platforms and copy-paste the data into excel spreadsheets, it's a pretty time-consuming process.

However, with DashThis, you can have all the data you need, automatically gathered into a good-looking report, ready to share with your boss or client! 

Here's how to automate your reports with DashThis and have a local marketing report on-hand in seconds. 

1- Create your free DashThis account

You can start by using a free account for 15 days and get your local marketing report with your own data. (And don't worry, we don't need your personal information or credit card!)

2- Connect your digital marketing platforms

Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google My Business, Google Search Console, CallRail, Facebook Ads; all your favourite marketing platforms can be connected in seconds. You can even add your own proprietary data with CSV files.

3- Select a report template

If you want a report in seconds, choose the local business marketing template or Google My Business report template from the drop-down menu, and you’re all set! Or, you can simply create a blank dashboard and add your preferred KPIs as you go!

No IT or webinar needed, it's that easy! And you can do this for all your small local businesses, domain names, or clients! There's no account limit!

Once it's done, your report should look something like this: 

Not bad huh? And you can get that report with your own data in the next couple of minutes, so why not? 

Tips to create the best local marketing report

No matter if you decide to use DashThis or another marketing reporting tool, you'll want to have the most easy-to-understand, clear, and concise report possible. Here are some tips to help you achieve that:

Aggregate your data 

Having a great overview of all your different locations is crucial and being able to aggregate your different metrics can really help you present an easy-to-understand and complete report.

It’s important for a good local report to have all your different locations in the same dashboard, and being able to aggregate your data for each of them together for a better understanding of your marketing results overall.

This way you can see your location’s data separately and together, all at the same place. 

Add sections and headers 

In order to see all your data at a glance and be able to act on it quickly, you need to make sure everything is well sectioned.

Add headers to section off each part of your report either by location, region, location category, by digital marketing strategy (SEO, PPC, web analytics) or by marketing platform (Facebook Ads, Google my Business, SEMrush).

This way, you’ll be able to navigate the report easily and find exactly what you’re looking for faster.

Add graphs and charts

What if your local marketing report was just an endless list of stats? It would be headache-inducing wouldn't it?

That's why graphs and charts are crucial, they help you see very clearly the impact of your digital marketing, and be able to act on it quickly as well. 

Here's a great example of the difference it makes to add clear charts and graphs.

Send your reports automatically

Another time-saving tip is to automate email dispatches so that your reports can basically send themselves every single month, week, or even day!

That way, you don't have to export your reports and send multiple emails yourself every time.

Luckily for you, DashThis offers this feature with every single plan!