The one marketing report worth reading every month

You pay for marketing every month, and every month a report arrives. Forty slides of charts. You skim it, lose the link, and a month later you still can't say whether any of it brought in a customer.

We're an agency ourselves, so this is an awkward post to write. It's a useful one, though, because the report worth reading fits on one screen.

What a useful monthly report looks like

It answers four questions in order, each with one number and a short paragraph of context.

1. What did we spend? One total covering your team's time, agency fees, ad spend on Google or Meta, and software.

2. What did we get? Leads, calls, WhatsApp enquiries, bookings, sales or sign-ups, whichever is the real unit of value for your business. If enquiries arrive on WhatsApp, labelling each chat in WhatsApp Business makes them easy to count.

3. What did each one cost? Cost per lead, booking or sale, worked out from the first two numbers.

4. What are we changing next month, and why? Two or three sentences on what worked, what didn't, and what to do more or less of.

If an agency can't answer those four questions in five minutes a month, ask them why.

Metrics that don't deserve a slide

On their own, these tell you very little:

• Impressions and reach. They count screens that could have shown your ad or post. What people did next is the result.
• Engagement rate. Likes can be bought, and the rate says little about whether the business is growing.
• Click-through rate on its own. Clicks that bring no enquiries are attention you paid for, so read it next to the conversion rate.
• Bounce rate. A high rate on a homepage may be a problem. On a mobile page built to get a phone call, it can mean the page did its job.
• Followers gained. Followers can be bought too. Customers are what you're after.

A good report leads with cost per lead or booking and treats these as background.

Metrics that do deserve a slide

By channel:

• SEO: movement on the searches you track, organic visits to the pages that sell, and leads from search. Our SEO basics primer explains what drives them.
• Google Business Profile: searches, calls, direction requests and website clicks. Google shows these free in the profile's performance view, so any Google Business Profile management you pay for should report them.
• Paid ads, if you run them: spend, conversions, cost per conversion and return on ad spend, by campaign.
• Content: articles published, visits to them and clicks through to your service pages.
• Social: messages, saves and shares per post, and leads from social.

Each one links back to money earned or a customer getting in touch.

The honesty filter

Once a quarter, ask how much of the change came from the work and how much from the market, such as a strong season or a new competitor down the street. A good agency tells you which is which. It won't take credit for the season.

A five-minute habit

Set a reminder for the first Monday of each month. Write down last month's four numbers and one sentence on what you're changing. After a year you'll know more about how your marketing works than plenty of owners who pay agencies large monthly fees.

Every WebAxis monthly service comes with a one-page report each month, and the pricing page shows what each one costs.