Getting started with a custom reporting strategy

You will learn

Learn how to build a comprehensive reporting strategy to grow your business and answer any key performance questions that arise over time. Klaviyo’s robust, customizable analytics let you leverage your data to understand business and marketing performance. With our custom report builder you can understand how customers interact with your messaging over time, identify what owned marketing efforts need to be improved upon, and focus on where you should adjust your marketing strategy to grow your business.

What is a custom reporting strategy?

Your custom reporting tools live in the Analytics tab.

1. To navigate there, select Analytics > Custom Reports.

Custom reports allow you to analyze your brand and marketing performance. They are intentionally flexible, so you can easily answer new questions that arise as your business grows and consumer behavior and industry trends shift.

Klaviyo provides five focused starting points to help you build key reports quickly, but having a strategy around your analytics before diving in will help you use the tool to the fullest. For more information on any of these, head to their designated documentation or custom reports in Klaviyo.

In the following sections, you will learn how to:

• Plan
  What information you seek and how you wish to find it.
• Implement
  Your plan with either metrics or reporting strategies.
• Analyze
  Your data to adjust where needed and grow your business.

Step 1: plan

Similar to an architect needing a blueprint, your first step in building a comprehensive reporting strategy is to plan it out. Start by brainstorming what business questions you wish to answer. In a nutshell: what do you hope to gain from analyzing your data?

This will vary depending on your business and industry, but it is useful to make a list of insights you hope to gain from your analytics that will help you grow your business.

Some questions may include:

• What products are ordered most often? Which products are returned most often?
• Of my campaign emails, which type (e.g., newsletter, product announcement, sale/promotion, etc.) results in the highest engagement and conversions?
• What customer groups trigger a certain metric most often?
• What are my best selling product collections month over month?
• How do changing seasons affect my sales? How do my holiday marketing efforts stack up to my others?
• How is my business performing across important engagement and conversion metrics from month to month?
• Am I over- or underperforming on any critical key performance indicators (KPIs)?

These are just a few questions to start with as you build out a list that is specific to your business. Once you create a list of insights you need, consider what reports you should build to help you answer these questions.

Step 2: implement

There are several ways to analyze your data in Klaviyo. You can look directly at the metrics available in your account, or you can generate a report around a specific business use case. Below are strategies around reports you can build and ways to view your metrics.

Klaviyo’s custom reports feature provides five focused starting points to help you quickly build key reports. Each report can then be customized to help you answer the questions you’ve identified in your plan.

These report types include: 

• Single metric deep dive report
• Multi-metric report
• Campaign performance report
• Flow performance report
• Product performance report

1. To access custom analytics reports, click on the Analytics tab.

2. Then, select Create Custom Reports in the upper right-hand corner.

3. Use the dropdown to select the type of report you want to build. For inspiration around strategies for each report, check out the sections below.

Single metric deep dive report

The single metric deep dive report lets you focus on a single metric and slice and dice it by metric and profile property data to get a granular understanding of behavior. Think about what you hope to gain from focusing solely on one metric. Learn how to customize and utilize the single metric deep dive report.

Below are a few ways you can use this report to answer different business questions:

• Hone in on how a specific metric performs seasonally
  If you change up your messaging or product selection each season, the single metric deep dive Report can be a great way to analyze how these shifts affect a specific metric.
  
  For example, you can build a report around Placed Order or Opened Email to view the effect of a new spring collection. How your audience interacts with this content will provide insight into how your product and updated messages perform. This will also give you insight into how customers may react to changes in subsequent holidays throughout the year.

• Understand which customers convert
  The single metric deep dive report lets you explore customer behavior broken up by profile property. You can use this to understand how different customers engage with your brand and explore why this might be the case.
  
  For example, if you use different marketing copy that targets men and women, you can explore the Clicked Email metric grouped by gender. You can then take note of how different genders engage with your content and if one particular gender is more engaged than the other over time.

• Analyze return trends
  You can also use the single metric deep dive report to understand how a metric performs and why; for example, if you noticed an uptick in returns, explore which specific products lie at the root of the problem.
  
  For example if you select Refunded Order and group by time to see when upticks arise. Then, hone in on that time range and group by item to understand which specific product generates the most returns. You can use this information to investigate why returns occur. Perhaps the description does not adequately explain the product, sizing is unclear and customers are getting the wrong fit, or the product is not working as expected for all customers.

Multi-metric report

The multi-metric report lets you understand your business and marketing performance across all of your core metrics in one, unified report. Learn how to build the multi-metric report.

Below are some example use cases for when to employ the multi-metric report:

• Understand how your audience grows and shrinks over time
  The multi-metric report lets you see multiple metrics simultaneously and group them by profile properties. You can use this report to understand which acquisition channels gain and lose the most customers. Your report will center around subscription metrics (subscribed to list, unsubscribed from list, and unsubscribed) grouped by $source to understand which channels result in gains and losses over time. You can also group your results by properties like country, gender, loyalty tier, etc. to understand what types of customers are engaging or disengaging with your business.

• Analyze company performance
  By analyzing a variety of your metrics over the course of a year, you can view how your company has grown and where there is room for improvement going forward. To analyze your yearly performance, select any metrics that relate to your business and set the timeframe show results from the last year, sorted by month.

Campaign performance report

The campaign performance report groups your data by campaign with a list of standard campaign metrics that you can edit and filter to see how marketing initiatives perform over time. Learn how to build a campaign performance report.

Below are some example use cases for when to use the Campaign Performance Report:

• Monitor how different variations of a campaign perform
  If you run A/B tests for campaigns, the campaign performance report can help you analyze how each variation compares to the next so that you can see what works best for your audience. Include any engaged and conversion metrics that are relevant to your business.

• Analyze holiday marketing campaign performance
  The campaign performance report can help you to understand the performance of your holiday-specific campaign strategy.
  
  For example, if you use special promotions for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, you can monitor this promotion. Understanding performance will help you to mimic successful content and weed out any unsuccessful strategies as you adjust future holiday marketing campaigns. Create a tag for "Black Friday / Cyber Monday" and filter your report to only show campaigns with said tag.
  
  Note that you may select multiple tags at once in this dropdown, separated by the AND connector. This will make your filters more exclusive, meaning if a customer meets one filter tag but does not meet the other, they will be excluded from your report.

• Review your campaign performance for the year
  You can also create a campaign performance report to review your campaigns from the past year for an end-of-year review. Here, you can see how your campaigns perform across a variety of metrics that you deem important for your business performance. This data will be organized into tables that you can also export for future reference.
  
  You can customize this to include the campaign metrics you care about most, but in general, your report may look something like this:

Flows performance report

The flows performance report lets you dive into flow-specific engagement and conversion information. As with the campaign performance report, you can tailor your report by customizing the metrics you want to analyze and focusing your analysis using tags and time range filters. Learn how to build a flows performance report. 

Below are use cases for inspiration when building your own reports:

• Monitor flow deliverability when warming your account
  Monitoring your deliverability performance is crucial for a successful email marketing strategy, especially while warming your sending infrastructure. When warming your account, start by only sending flows rather than diving into campaigns which have lower deliverability. This builds your sender reputation and ensures that you remain a good sender in the eyes of inbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.). You can monitor your performance during warming by creating a Flow Performance Report that focuses on key deliverability metrics. This will help you track your progress and monitor weekly improvements as you build up your sender reputation. Keep an eye on your deliverability to assess when to start sending campaigns.

• Monitor flow sending activity
  Using the flow performance report, you can focus on multiple engagement and conversion metrics to monitor your sending activity. Add key engagement data to your report using the Standard Metrics section to track engagement over time. Then, group your report by month, week, or day. This will provide insight into whether your flows are seeing more or less sending activity than usual.

• Track your yearly flow performance
  If you schedule an end-of-the-year review to see flow performance across a variety of metrics, then this report is the perfect way to organize your data, accounting for any metrics you deem as key to business performance. Customize your report to include the flow metrics you care about most, and either set your range to be broken down monthly or show one number for your entire year range.

Product performance report

The product performance report lets you analyze product performance across key funnel metrics like browse, checkout, and purchase. Learn how to build a product performance report.

Below are use cases for inspiration when building your own reports:

• Find out which product or collection are converting
  The product performance report can help you better understand your product and product collection performance over time. Add any applicable key funnel metrics, such as Viewed Productand Started Checkout.
  
  If you see high views but low checkouts, look at your current pricing, availability, or sizing to decipher why customers are failing to convert. If you see a rise in people starting a checkout but not placing an order for a given product, you may want to make adjustments to your checkout page or abandoned cart flow to encourage a purchase. It is also beneficial to view data around subscribers who view a product but do not start a checkout. Consider adding a popup that is triggered by someone attempting to close their browser or leave that page.

• Find your top-performing product
  By focusing on conversion metrics, you can view purchase behavior over time for a given product or collection. In particular, focus on data for past placed orders to gain a deeper understanding of which products drive the most conversions. Use these results to understand which products sell and which do not; moreover, consider how that information can be used to change what you promote in your marketing content.

• Learn how a limited time offer, sale, or new product performs
  Hone in on a specific product or promotion during a set time. This is useful if you are launching a new product or have a limited time offer available on your site. See how audiences interact with this product across multiple conversion metrics to get a big-picture view of whether or not you reached your goal with this initiative.

Step 3: act upon your insights

Once you build your report, use it to align internally on performance metrics, reassess your marketing efforts, and grow your business. Dig deeper into what isn’t currently working with your audience and change habits that do not improve your deliverability or revenue. Learn what ecommerce and industry performance benchmarks are good or not good.

If there are specific products that result in high returns or low placed orders, consider editing your marketing copy and making adjustments to the product description or product itself where needed. If you notice a dip in any KPIs — such as open rate, conversion rate, and revenue — adjust sending practices and marketing strategies to elevate your metrics. Learn how to address decreasing KPIs immediately and effectively..

On the other hand, in areas that perform well and generate strong conversion metrics, dig into why this is the case. Check what you were doing at the time of that spike in growth and try to duplicate that success in the future. Note which campaigns, flows, and specific products draw your customer’s attention and find ways to improve your performance by expanding on the things that work.

Part of growing your business is brainstorming new ways to level up your current marketing content across all channels. Check out the ideas below for inspiration:

• A/B Testing for flows, campaigns, and sign-up forms
  To see which content results in the highest engagement from your audience, try testing different variations of your emails and forms. The results will guide your design and copy decisions for future content.
• Advanced segmentation
  Advance your segmentation strategy across channels, such as emails, forms, and social media. By understanding your audience you can better communicate with them through targeted marketing.

Additional resources

• Getting started with reporting
• How to build and use custom reports in Klaviyo