Reporting built around the questions you actually get asked
There are two failure modes in marketing reporting. The first is a forty slide deck full of impressions that answers nothing. The second is a live dashboard with sixty widgets that nobody has opened since the week it was built. Both share a cause: nobody decided what question the reporting exists to answer.
We build backwards from the questions. What did we spend, what did it produce, what did a lead cost, what changed and what happens next. A live dashboard for anyone who wants to poke at the detail, and one written page a month from the person who did the work, with the months that went badly explained rather than buried.
Decide what the report is for
Reporting exists to support a decision. Which channel gets more budget, whether a campaign continues, whether the agency is worth keeping. We build backwards from those decisions, which produces a much shorter report than building forward from what the tools can display.
The dashboard and the report do different jobs
A live dashboard lets someone check a number without asking. A written report tells you what the numbers mean and what we are doing about it. Sending only a dashboard link is how agencies avoid interpretation, and interpretation is most of what you are paying for.
Same shape every month
Consistency is what makes a report readable at a glance. Same sections, same order, same metrics. Changing the layout each month, particularly after a bad one, is a well known way of making comparison difficult.
Include the phone or the report is wrong
For a service business, a report without call data systematically undervalues whichever channel drives calls. Every report we produce has calls in it alongside forms, with the source attached.
Push through to revenue where you can
Cost per lead is a proxy. Cost per customer is the real number, and where your CRM can export outcomes we connect it. That single addition frequently reverses which channel looks like the best investment.
Leave the bad numbers in
A report that only contains good news is not information, it is reassurance. When a channel had a poor month it is in there with an explanation and a plan. That is what makes the good months believable.
Recent reading from our team
Written by our team, not spun by a tool. Everything we publish is something we do for clients.
