Providing impact reports to your sponsors is an important part of the sales cycle as it will help you increase sponsor retention and renewal rates.

A good impact report places your sponsor at the center of the conversation. It puts measurements, quality assurance, and accountability data into context for them.

Without an impact report, there's no way for your advertiser to know what messages are resonating with your readers.

Impact reports allow your sponsors to gain valuable insights into how their ads are performing so they can understand the effectiveness of a particular advertising campaign. This transparency helps build trust between you and your sponsors as it demonstrates a commitment to accountability and delivering measurable results.

Impact reports can also be used as a tool to showcase the value that your sponsorship opportunities bring. An easy-to-read report that highlights key metrics will help your sponsors understand the impact of their advertising spend. When you are able to effectively communicate value to a sponsor they are much more likely to continue working with you.

You might feel uncomfortable sending an impact report to a sponsor if their ads underperformed, but they can actually be a very important sales tool!

Regular reporting on sponsorship and ad performance will help you identify areas for improvement and optimization that you can then communicate to the sponsor. This proactive approach demonstrates your commitment to driving results and maximizing your sponsor's return on investment.

If you're looking to develop strong, lasting relationships with value-aligned sponsors, impact reporting can help. By sharing performance data with your sponsors, you can engage in meaningful discussions about campaign strategies, goals, and objectives. This approach can help align expectations, address concerns or challenges, and strengthen your relationship with sponsors.

For impact reports for email sponsors, you will need to include the total number of recipients, the email's open rate, the unique link clicks for the ad, and the CTR.

Impact reports for display advertising served using Indie Ads Manager can be prepared using information found in Indie Ads Manager.

In your report, include a breakdown of total impressions, eligible, and viewable (if all are available). Include the total number of clicks and the CTR. You can also include a viewable CTR if you would like.

Note: If you are serving ads using the Indie Website plugin, you will need to use Google Analytics to prepare your impact reports (Read more: tracking ad performance using Google Analytics).

The percentage of people who open an email, it shows whether subscribers are seeing or reading your emails.

Open Rate = (Total Emails Opened/Total Emails Delivered) x 100%

This is simple a unit for the number of times a link was clicked in a given period.

The percentage of people who click a link, showing how engaged your audience is with your content.

Click-Through Rate = (Total Links Clicked/Total Emails Delivered) x 100%

The percentage of people who open and click a link in an email. This measures how frequently an email open will lead to a link click.

Click-to-Open Rate = (Unique Clicks/Unique Opens) x 100%

The number of times a user has viewed an advertisement in a zone within a given period of time. In Indie Ads Manager, there are total impressions, eligible impressions, and viewable impressions.

An email recipient is an individual who has opted-in to receive an email, they are the owner of the "to" email address. Email recipients are often referred to as contacts or subscribers.

Read More: Digital advertising glossary