What Should a Marketing Report Include?

Most owners receive a marketing report every month and act on almost none of it. The charts are real, the numbers are accurate, and at the end of reading it you still do not know whether to keep going, change course, or spend more. That is not a reading problem. It is a design problem with the document.

This post is about the report itself: what to ask for, what belongs on page one, and what should be moved to the back or removed. If your real question is whether the agency is delivering at all, start with how to tell if your marketing agency is working. If you cannot yet count where enquiries come from, how to track where your leads come from comes first, because no report can show a number nobody is recording. The same advice applies if you write the report yourself for a partner or a board.

A Report Is a Decision Document, Not a Record of Effort

Before deciding what goes in, decide what the report is for. It has one reader with about five minutes, and that reader has four possible decisions: keep going as planned, change something specific, stop something, or put more money behind what is working. A report is useful in exact proportion to how easily it supports one of those four.

Apply that test to any page of your current report. If you removed the page, would any decision change? A slide of follower growth with no connection to enquiries fails. A table of two hundred keyword positions fails, because nobody decides anything from row 140. A note that the new service page produced its first six calls passes, because it tells you something is working and suggests where to do more of it.

Page One: The Five Lines

The first page should hold five things and nothing else. Everything below them is supporting material.

1. Enquiries received. Calls, form submissions, booking requests and messages, counted from the business’s own records. 2. What now exists. Pages published, campaigns launched, posts scheduled, fixes made, each with a link you can click. 3. The one number the work is meant to move, shown against a comparison. For a search engagement that might be calls from search; for a paid campaign, cost per enquiry. 4. What did not work, in plain sentences. 5. Next month’s commitments, as a numbered list.

Why the enquiry count comes from your records

An agency can see its tools. It usually cannot see your phone, your shared inbox, or the booking system the front desk uses. So the number that matters most is the one it is least able to report on its own. The fix is a simple monthly handoff: someone on your side sends a count, or the agency is given read access to the system that holds it. A report that leads with your number rather than a platform’s keeps everyone honest, including you.

Every Number Needs a Comparison, a Source, and a Sentence

A number on its own tells you almost nothing. “1,840 visits” could be excellent or alarming. Each figure that appears on page one should travel with three things.

A comparison. Last month, and the same month last year. The second matters more than most reports admit, because nearly every business is seasonal and a month-over-month drop in November may be a year-over-year rise. A source. Which tool produced the number, so you know whether two figures can be compared at all. A sentence. One line saying what the number means and what will be done about it. “Calls from search rose from 22 to 31, mostly to the new emergency page; next month we build the matching page for the second service area.” That sentence is the report. The chart is decoration.

Platform totals grade their own homework

Ad platforms and social networks report conversions using their own attribution rules, and each one is generous to itself. A customer who saw a social ad, later clicked a search ad and then called can be claimed by both. Add the platform totals together and you will often get more enquiries than the business received. That is not fraud; it is how the systems are built. It does mean a platform’s figure should sit beside your own count, never instead of it. The wider measurement gap is set out in our research on the attribution blind spot.

Annotations: The Line That Explains the Chart

Six months from now, nobody will remember why March dipped. Was it a search update, a phone outage, a competitor’s sale, a site change, a staff member on leave who normally answered the calls? A good report keeps a short change log: dated notes of anything that could move the numbers, whether the agency caused it or not.

Include your own changes too. A price increase, a new opening hour, a pause in the referral program. Those belong in the log because they explain results the agency would otherwise take credit or blame for. Over a year, the change log becomes the most valuable page in the file, because it turns a pile of charts into a history you can learn from.

The Section Most Reports Leave Out: What Did Not Work

Every honest month of marketing contains something that failed: an ad set that never found its audience, a post that reached nobody, a page that has not been picked up by search yet. A report with no failures in it has been edited for comfort, and an edited report is one you cannot make decisions from.

Ask for a short section with three columns: what was tried, what happened, and whether it is being kept, changed or dropped. It rarely runs longer than five lines. It tells you more about how the work is being managed than anything else in the document, and it is the section that most often saves money, because it is where spend on things that are not working gets stopped.

Next Month’s Commitments Are What You Check Next Month

The last line of page one should be a numbered list of what will be delivered before the next report: specific, countable, with a link to follow next time. “Publish the two service-area pages for the north suburbs” is a commitment. “Continue optimizing” is not.

Then the next report opens by marking each item done, not done, or moved, with a reason. That single habit gives the reports continuity. Instead of twelve unconnected snapshots a year, you get one running record of promises and delivery. It also lines up neatly with a contract whose scope is written as outputs, which is the approach set out in what to ask before signing a marketing contract.

A Line for AI Assistant Visibility

A growing share of customers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI answers which business to call, and none of that shows up in traditional analytics. The practical way to report on it is a fixed set of ten to fifteen questions a real customer would ask, run each month in logged-out assistants. Record whether your business is named, which competitors are, and whether anything said about you is wrong.

The prompts must stay the same month to month, or the line is meaningless. We build with Claude Code, which makes running and logging a fixed prompt set cheap enough to include in every report rather than as an occasional project. The method behind that test is in how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, and it is a standard part of our answer engine optimization work.

What Belongs in the Appendix, and What Should Go

The appendix is reference material: keyword position tables, post-by-post engagement, full campaign exports, technical audit results. Keep it, because occasionally you or a future vendor will need it. Do not read it every month.

Some things should not appear at all. Hours logged presented as a headline. Screenshots of dashboards with no comparison period. “Industry benchmark” figures with no named source. Follower counts with no line connecting them to enquiries. Each of these takes up space that a decision could have used.

Access beats screenshots

A report should summarize data you can check, not replace it. You should hold your own login to your analytics, Search Console, ad accounts and social profiles, so that any number on page one can be traced to its source in a minute. If the only way to see your own figures is through the agency’s slides, fix that first; do I own my website covers which accounts should be in your name.

How Often, and How Long

Monthly, on a fixed date, works for most small businesses. A report that arrives on the third of every month is a sign of a managed process; one that arrives whenever it is ready usually is not. Keep the monthly report to a page plus appendix.

Once a quarter, step back for a longer review that looks at outcomes rather than outputs: how many enquiries became customers, what those customers were worth, and which channels produced them. Search work in particular moves too slowly to judge monthly. Weekly reports are only worth the time for paid campaigns spending fast enough that a bad week is expensive, and even then a three-line note is usually enough.

A One-Page Template to Send Your Agency

Send this outline and ask for next month’s report in this shape. Any competent agency can produce it.

Last month’s commitments — each marked done, not done, or moved, with a reason. Enquiries — total from our records, by source where known, against last month and last year. What now exists — linked list of everything published, launched or fixed. The main number — the one metric this work is meant to move, with comparison, source and one sentence. AI assistant check — fixed prompt set, named or not named, anything wrong. What did not work — tried, result, keep or drop. Change log — anything that could explain the numbers. Next month’s commitments — numbered and countable. Appendix — everything else.

If an agency resists this format, that tells you something. If you are deciding whether to keep reporting in-house instead, marketing agency vs hiring a marketing employee weighs that choice. Our SEO services and social media analytics work are both reported in this shape.