What a Good Marketing Report Looks Like

We inherit a lot of accounts from other agencies during onboarding calls, and the reports clients show us follow a familiar pattern: a screenshot of a dashboard, a single ROAS number, and a sentence like "performance is trending well." That's not a report. That's a status update with no way to verify it.

Five things a report needs to include

1. The number that matters, next to the number from last period. Not just "cost per lead: $42." Show $42 this month against $58 last month, so the direction is obvious without a follow-up email.

2. What changed, specifically. "We paused two underperforming ad sets and shifted their budget to the top creative" tells you something happened for a reason. "We optimized the campaign" tells you nothing.

3. A breakdown by the thing you actually sell. Blended account-level numbers hide which product, service, or campaign is doing the work. If one campaign is carrying the account and another is bleeding budget, you should be able to see that in thirty seconds.

4. What's being tested next, and why. A report that only looks backward doesn't help you plan. Ours always includes the next two to three weeks of testing plans tied to what the data showed.

5. A live link, not a static file. PDFs and screenshots are already out of date by the time you open them. A dashboard you can check anytime removes the "can I get an update" email entirely.

The two things most reports leave out on purpose

Wasted spend. If $600 of last month's budget went to a keyword or audience that never converted, a good report says so directly instead of burying it in a blended average. It's an uncomfortable line item for an agency to include, which is exactly why it matters that it's there.

A plain answer to "is this working." Every report should let you answer that question in under ten seconds. If you have to interpret five charts to figure out whether last month was good or bad, the report has failed at its one job.

What we send clients

Every account gets a live dashboard covering spend, cost per result, and revenue where applicable, updated continuously. On top of that, a short written summary goes out weekly or monthly depending on the service, covering what changed, why, and what's next — the same five things above, every time, no exceptions.

If your current reporting doesn't let you answer "is this working" without a phone call, that's worth fixing before anything else about your marketing.