What your monthly marketing report should tell you

A monthly marketing report should let you answer one question without asking anyone: did this month's spend produce business worth having? Most reports cannot answer it, because they measure activity rather than outcome — and activity always looks like progress. If your report runs to twenty pages and you still have to ask "so is it working?", the report is the problem.

There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in a lot of businesses. The agency presents. Every chart points up and to the right. Everyone nods. And then somebody from sales says the enquiries have been rubbish, and nobody can reconcile the two accounts of the same month, because the numbers being presented were never connected to the numbers sales cares about.

That gap is not usually dishonesty. It is that activity is easy to measure and outcome is hard, so reports drift towards whatever is easy to put on a slide.

Why reports drift towards the wrong numbers

Three things push in the same direction.

Activity metrics always improve. Spend more and impressions rise. Publish more and rankings move somewhere. Post more and engagement goes up. None of these can really fail, which is exactly why they are comfortable to report and useless for judging whether to continue.

The platforms hand them to you. Every ad and analytics tool exports a default dashboard full of sessions, reach and click-through rate. A report assembled from defaults will be a report about defaults.

Nobody is asked for anything better. In our experience most clients never specify what the report should contain. The agency picks, the client accepts, and a year later nobody can say what the work produced.

The six numbers that belong in it

Not twenty pages. Six numbers, on the first page, in this order.

1. Qualified enquiries, by source

Not form fills. Not "leads". The count of enquiries that a human looked at and judged to be a plausible customer. If nobody is classifying enquiries, that is the first thing to fix — it takes about thirty seconds per enquiry and it is the foundation for everything below.

Split by source, so you can see which channel is actually producing people worth talking to rather than which is producing the most rows.

2. Cost per qualified enquiry

Total spend, including the agency fee, divided by the number in row one. This is the number most worth arguing about, and it usually looks worse than the cost per lead everyone had been celebrating. That is the point. We have written about why cost per lead is the wrong number to optimise — the short version is that platforms will happily find you more of exactly the wrong people if that is what you asked them for.

3. What happened to last month's enquiries

A line saying how many of the previous period's qualified enquiries became quotes, and how many became customers. Marketing reports almost never include this, because it requires the agency to ask the client for data. Ask anyway. Without it nobody can tell the difference between a channel that produces interest and a channel that produces revenue.

4. Revenue attributed to the work

Imperfect, caveated, and still worth stating. Attribution is genuinely hard — Google's own attribution documentation is a long read about why a single click rarely deserves the whole credit. But "we cannot attribute this perfectly" is an argument for stating the number with its assumptions, not for leaving it out.

5. What changed, and why

A dated list of what was actually done: budgets moved, pages published, tests started and stopped, tracking fixed. This is the cheapest and most neglected part of a report. Without it, a result in month six cannot be traced back to a decision in month three, and the account relearns the same lessons every time somebody new joins it.

6. What is not working

One honest paragraph. A month in which everything worked is a month in which nothing was tested hard enough. An agency that never reports a failure is either not taking risks or not telling you about them, and both are worth knowing.

The numbers that are usually there to fill space

None of these are fake. They are all real measurements of something. They just do not answer the question the person paying is asking.

Commonly reported	What it actually tells you
Impressions	How often you were eligible to be seen. Rises with budget. Rises with bad targeting too.
Sessions	How many visits happened. A traffic spike from the wrong audience looks identical to a good month.
Average position	Where you rank on average across terms of wildly different value. Moving from 40 to 20 on terms nobody buys from reads as progress.
Engagement rate	How people behaved once they arrived. Useful for diagnosing a page, meaningless for judging a programme.
Followers	Almost never connected to revenue in a business that sells considered services.
Impressions share	Genuinely useful for diagnosing a paid account, frequently presented as an outcome.

Keep them in an appendix if they are useful for diagnosis. The argument here is about the first page, not about deleting data.

The tracking that makes this possible

Two pieces of plumbing do most of the work, and both are commonly missing.

Enquiry classification. Somebody marks each enquiry as qualified or not, in the CRM or in a spreadsheet. Without this, rows one to three are impossible and the report has no choice but to count form fills.

Sending outcomes back to the platforms. Once you know which enquiries became customers, that information can be fed back so the ad platforms optimise towards deals rather than submissions — Google documents this as offline conversion imports. This is the single change that most often moves cost per acquisition in the accounts we inherit, and it is a plumbing job rather than a creative one.

Neither requires new software. Both require somebody to decide they matter.

How to fix your reporting in one meeting

Ask your agency, or your own team, for the six numbers above, in that order, on one page. Then watch what happens.

If the response is a schedule for when they can be provided, you are in good shape. If the response explains why those numbers are not really the right way to look at it, you have learned something more useful than any chart in the current report.

And if you would like a second opinion on what your current reporting is actually telling you, that is a conversation we are happy to have — tell us what you sell and we will tell you which numbers we would want to see first. It is also the first thing we rebuild on search and paid media programmes, before any budget is spent, because a year optimising against the wrong number is considerably more expensive than a month spent fixing the measurement.