The one marketing report you should actually read every month

Most agency reports are forty slides of charts that flatter the agency. You read them once, lose the link, and the next month you have no idea whether anything actually worked.

We are an agency, so this is a slightly awkward post to write. It is also the most useful thing we can publish.

What a useful monthly marketing report looks like

A monthly report should fit on one screen. It should answer four questions, in order, with one number each and one short paragraph of context. Nothing else.

1. What did we spend? The total - your time, agency fees, ad spend on Google or Meta, software subscriptions. One number.

2. What did we get? Leads, calls, bookings, sales, signups. Whatever the actual unit of value for your business is. Not impressions, sessions or follower counts. One number.

3. What did each one cost? Cost per lead, cost per booking, cost per sale. Calculated from numbers 1 and 2. One number.

4. What are we changing next month, and why? Two or three sentences. What worked, what did not, what we are doubling down on, what we are killing.

That is the report. If your agency cannot produce that in five minutes a month, you do not have a marketing partner - you have a charting hobby.

The metrics that do not deserve a slide

These are common in agency reports and almost always meaningless on their own:

• Impressions. Ad shown to who? In what context? For what reason? An impression is an unconfirmed possibility, not a result.
• Reach. Same problem. Reach is how many phones could have seen something. Conversion is what they did after.
• Engagement rate. Likes per follower is gamed by buying engagement. It tells you almost nothing about whether your business is growing.
• Click-through rate, on its own. A great CTR with no conversions means you are paying for attention you cannot convert. Look at it together with conversion rate, never alone.
• Bounce rate. A high bounce rate on a homepage might be bad. A high bounce rate on a "phone number please" mobile landing page is exactly the point.
• Followers gained. Bought followers exist. Real followers are nice. Customers are better.

A report that leads with any of these without leading with cost-per-something is showing you the dashboard, not the result.

The metrics that do deserve a slide

Per channel:

• SEO: ranking movement on tracked keywords, organic traffic to revenue pages, organic-source leads.
• GBP: searches, calls, direction requests, conversion calls - all of which Google gives you for free in the insights tab.
• Paid (if applicable): spend, conversions, cost per conversion, return on ad spend. By campaign.
• Content: new pieces published, traffic to those pieces, internal click-through to services.
• Social: DMs received, saves and shares per post, social-source leads.

Notice the pattern: every number ladders back to a thing that earns you money or a thing that makes a customer reach out.

The honesty filter

Once a quarter, an agency should run the report through one honest filter: how much of the change is us, and how much is the market? Some months everything goes up because seasonal demand was strong; some months everything goes down because a competitor opened next door. A good agency will tell you which is which. A bad one will take credit for the seasonality and blame the market for the dips.

A five-minute habit

If you do nothing else, set a calendar reminder for the first Monday of every month: open last month’s report, write down the four numbers, write one sentence on what you are changing.

Do that for twelve months and you will know more about how your marketing works than 90% of business owners we meet - including some who pay agencies large monthly fees.

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WebAxis retainer clients get the four-number report on the first working day of every month, in a single page. See how we actually report and what is included in each package tier. Or plan your growth on a 30-minute call.