The Foundation of a Strong Campaign Recap

Campaign recaps have become an expectation of doing business in the digital marketing era, but they often become a delivery report instead of reporting on the performance of a campaign. The goal of any recap should be to sell the results of that campaign in an effort to retain and grow the business. Over the years, I’ve seen some really good recaps, and I’ve seen some bad ones.

The bad recaps are consistent in form - they focus on things like impressions delivered, clicks, CTR, video completion rates, emails delivered, open rate, etc. In short, they simply pull a bunch of numbers into a PowerPoint slide or Excel spreadsheet with little to no context of what those numbers mean or how they relate to the desired business goals of the client. 

On the other hand, good campaign recaps combine the numbers with a story, similar to a broadcast of any sporting event. Think about it - there are always two people in the booth for any sporting event – one is responsible for the play-by-play, and the other adds the color commentary. Strong recaps include the “play-by-play” reporting of the numbers as well as the “color commentary” to give those numbers context. 

The marriage of numbers and context are crucial so that the intended audience can easily determine how the raw numbers relate to their desired business results. It should be woven throughout the fabric of your recap.

It is also important to note that while both need to be present to deliver a story that resonates with your audience, resist the urge to pull in extra measurements that don’t enhance the story of how your campaign is driving the results they wanted. Determining the 2-4 measures of success that you will use for your campaign early in the sales process will help you not overshare. 

So what else should be included in your recap? Here five key areas that should always be incorporated into your campaign recap: 

1. Campaign Overview: the goal here is to provide a reminder of what you set out to achieve. Include the dates of the campaign and the reporting window. You should also restate the desired business results and the measures of success that you determined with your client.
   
   
2. Executive Summary: this is your opportunity to give a 30,000-foot view of what is happening in the campaign so far. You want to provide an overview of the results and the type of response you are seeing at this point.
   
   
3. Campaign Performance: is the presenting of results and insights from your client’s analytics in a story. If you incorporated the consumer journey into your presentation, consider using a similar structure to share the results and analytic insights of your integrated campaign into one cohesive story.
   
   
4. Creative Execution: pull the creative used in the campaign into the recap. If you have multiple sizes with a similar message, don’t feel the need to pull in each size.
   
   
5. Recommendations: a must have in any recap. Focus on what to optimize going forward, i.e., what to keep doing and why, what to watch and why, and what to stop, start, or change. 

Remember the goal here is to prove your campaign is driving the desired business results they wanted, not to show them how many impressions you delivered!