Your Marketing Report Should Answer Three Questions. Most Don’t.

The report that looks busy and says nothing

I run the client side of every account here, so I see a lot of reports that were built by someone else before a business came to us. They tend to look the same. Twelve pages. A line going up. Words like impressions, sessions, engagement rate and domain authority. A screenshot of a dashboard. And at the end, a sentence along the lines of “we continue to see positive momentum.”

The owner who forwards it to me usually says a version of the same thing: “I don’t know what any of this means, and I don’t know if it’s working.” That is the most common complaint I hear about agencies, ahead of price, ahead of slow work. People do not feel lied to so much as kept in the dark.

A report is not a record of activity. It is an answer to the person paying the bill. If you finish reading it and still cannot say what you spent, what you got for it, and what is changing next month, the report has not done its job, however many pages it has.

Question one: what did I spend, all in

Start with money, because it is the number you can check. You should be able to see two figures side by side: what the platforms charged (Google Ads, Meta, Local Services Ads) and what the agency charged. Not blended. Not “total investment.” Two numbers.

This is not me being picky. For Google Ads it is written into the rules agencies agree to. Google’s transparency requirements for third parties say that if a monthly report is required, it must include costs, clicks and impressions at the account level, and that when cost data is shared “third parties must report the exact amount charged by Google, exclusive of any fees that they charge.” Google’s own advertiser guide to working with third parties puts it plainly: you have the right to know the number of clicks, impressions and the total cost of your ads, at a minimum.

If your report shows one combined number and you cannot get it split, that is your first warning sign. The split is not hard to produce. Anyone with access to the ad account can read it off the billing page in a minute.

Question two: what did I get, in units I recognise

This is where most reports lose people, because they count things that are easy to count rather than things that matter to a contractor or a clinic. So here is a plain-English key to the numbers that usually show up, using Google’s own definitions from the Search Console performance report: impressions are “how many times your site appeared in Search results”; clicks are “the number of times a user clicked your site from Google Search results”; click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions; average position is where your top result sat on the page.

Those are real numbers and we track them. But none of them is a phone call. Between a click and a job there are several more steps: the visitor has to find the number or the form, then call, then be someone you can help, then book. A report that stops at clicks has stopped four steps short of your bank account.

So the second section of a good report is about leads, and it is honest about how they were counted. Calls from the site, with how many lasted longer than a minute. Form fills, with how many were spam or recruiters. Messages through your Business Profile. If call tracking is not set up yet, the report should say so rather than pretend. We would rather show you a smaller, true number than a larger one nobody can stand behind. That is the whole argument of our transparency post and it is the reason we show every client the source account, not a screenshot of it.

Question three: what changes next, and why

A report that ends with “we’ll keep monitoring” has not finished. The last section should be a short list of what is being changed in the coming month and the reason for each change. Two pages were added because the phone is not ringing for drain cleaning. A campaign was paused because it spent three hundred dollars and produced one call from a supplier. The review ask is moving to the day after the job because nobody was replying on day five.

This is the part owners want most, because it tells them someone is paying attention. It is also the part that is hardest to fake, which is why it is so often missing. Activity lists (“published 4 blogs, built 12 links”) are not the same thing. Activity tells you the agency was busy. The change list tells you the agency was thinking.

The month-two question: is this getting better or not

Every report should compare the month to something. The same month last year is the fairest comparison for a seasonal trade, because a roofer in February will never look good against October. Last month is fine for paid campaigns, which move faster. What you want to avoid is a report that picks whichever comparison looks best this time.

We settle the comparison in the first month and then leave it alone. When you read our report in month six, it is built the same way as month one, so you can lay them side by side. If a number went down, it says so, and the next section says what we are doing about it. Our why us page lists this as a commitment, and it is one of the things clients tell me they notice most.

What to ask for if your current report is not doing this

You do not have to change agencies to fix a bad report. Send three requests in writing. One: show platform spend and agency fees as separate lines. Two: show leads, not just traffic, and tell me how they were counted. Three: end every report with what you are changing next month and why. A good agency will say yes to all three the same day. If you get resistance on the first one, remember that Google’s rules are on your side for the ad spend part.

And if you would rather have the report explained out loud than read it, ask for a standing call. Ours is a short one with the same agenda each time: what happened, what it means, what is next, and anything you want to raise. Most of what I learn about a client’s business that changes the marketing plan comes out on that call, not from a dashboard. You can read more about how I work with clients or book a call if you want to bring your current report and go through it together.