How to deliver new value to your clients – and improve client retention – with cross-channel reporting

Many agencies often work on just a fraction of their clients’ marketing strategies. This is especially true if you’re an agency that’s built a reputation and won clients based on your expertise in a specific channel.

But this approach only gives you a snapshot of the overall picture. Often, you don’t know what’s happening in the rest of your clients’ multi-channel campaigns, you can’t see how their content impacts yours, and you can’t identify trends across channels.

This can lead to significant challenges, such as increasing the cost per lead and duplicating efforts between you and your clients. And it leaves a huge opportunity on the table.

If you can understand the performance of your clients’ entire marketing campaigns and present these insights in a meaningful way, you can start delivering value beyond just the channel you work in. And crucially, increase the number of clients you retain.

Here’s a closer look at why cross-channel reporting is so important to delivering standout client service – and how you can implement it today.

Why the full picture matters

While you’re building a campaign in one of your clients’ channels – let’s say pay-per-click (PPC), for example – there’s a good chance your client will be experimenting in other channels.

They may have ongoing SEO, offline, social, and referral campaigns, all working towards the same objective they’ve tasked you with for PPC. It’s likely their efforts will influence your own campaign and vice versa. But without the right data, there’s no way to see the impact each campaign has.

For instance, your success in generating leads from PPC ads might be cannibalising the leads your client generates from their SEO campaign. While it might initially look good for your results, it will only increase your client’s cost per lead and acquisition.

When you only track the results of the channel you’re working in, it can be challenging to identify trends like these. And it can also become difficult to validate your own results.

“Without understanding the full journey of your clients’ visitors, you can’t confidently claim which of their leads you’re generating or how valuable they are,” explains Lawrence Cavill Grant, Head of Commercial at Mediahawk. “Your ads might be creating dozens of calls for your client, but without the right data, there’s no way to tell whether they’re genuinely interested prospects.”

Many agencies find themselves in this position today. So, if you can look at performance more holistically, you have a chance to stand above the competition and deliver an additional service to your clients.

How to understand the entire journey of your clients’ leads

If you can integrate your clients’ cross-channel data for them and provide comprehensive data-driven attribution models, you can help them boost results across their entire marketing activity – not just the parts you work on.

The insights you generate will also enable you to more accurately and confidently demonstrate the value of the work you deliver.

As an external marketing agency that’s likely a few steps removed from your clients’ data, it might feel like you’re restricted to the data from the campaigns you manage. But this isn’t the case.

With the right tools, you can build a complete picture of both your marketing efforts and your clients’ efforts in other channels, all by capturing data from its original source.

Use dynamic call tracking to see every step a lead takes

Rather than just relying on the data your clients currently capture, dynamic call tracking can give you highly focused insights into visitor journeys across every channel.

Using Mediahawk, your clients can use a dynamic number on their website that changes for each visitor. Then, every action a visitor takes is logged against that phone number, allowing you to track valuable insights such as what brought them to your client’s website, the campaigns they interacted with, and the actions they took after their call.

Unlike tools such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which only tracks online conversions, Mediahawk’s call tracking capabilities can help you consider your client’s complete marketing activity – including any offline campaigns such as print advertising.

This means you can accurately attribute 100% of your clients’ leads to the sources they came from. You can give your clients more insight into how their campaigns perform and prove the leads you’re generating.

You can even integrate the data you capture from calls into tools like GA4, making the data you and your clients are already capturing even more accurate.

“In our recent call tracking trends report, more than two-thirds of marketers reported they struggle to attribute sales to their channels,” adds Lawrence. “If you can offer that service as a marketing agency, you can solve a real challenge for your clients and become an invaluable partner beyond just the campaigns you deliver.”

Automate cross-channel reporting and gain 100% attribution

Delivering valuable client services isn’t just about capturing the right data. It also involves turning that data into contextualised, personalised insights, and supporting those insights with your own expertise.

Using Parameter Connect, you can easily automate cross-channel reporting to compare all the campaigns you’re managing for your clients – and the campaigns they’re managing – in a single, easy-to-use report.

In this report, you can pivot data however you want to build a better understanding of your clients’ entire marketing portfolios. And for the campaigns you run, you’ll be able to dig into the data and uncover accurate, granular metrics on their performance.

When Parameter Connect is combined with other reports, you can also show your clients even more details on their best-performing channels and campaigns.

For example, in Mediahawk’s source flow report, you can analyse sources at an individual level and see which lead to interactions and conversions. From there, you can spot exactly where to make changes that will trigger a real difference in campaign performance, helping you deliver a more valuable service.

Insights from all these reports can ultimately help you prove the value you’re creating, while delivering additional expertise and guidance to your clients.

How a full-service agency delivers greater ROI for its clients
Promote Online, a full-service digital marketing agency in Bristol, is known for its expertise in performance marketing – and Mediahawk is an invaluable tool for its marketers.
Using Mediahawk, the agency can gain deeper insights into its clients’ cross-channel efforts and uncover opportunities to optimise campaigns.
“Part of our agency growth and why we partner with Mediahawk is the fact we can prove beyond doubt the success of our campaigns,” says Raife Wieland, Director of Promote Online. “We can highlight good call examples, put monetary values against phone calls, and optimise our campaigns a lot quicker, smarter, and more efficiently.”

Summary

Cross-channel reporting doesn’t need to feel like an endless puzzle. With the right tools, you can understand your clients’ entire marketing activities and start delivering insights that make you an invaluable partner.

Book your free demo of Mediahawk, where we’ll show you how effortless cross-channel reporting can be, using solutions designed with agencies like yours in mind.