The short answer
A useful report answers three questions: what did we spend, what did it produce (calls, leads, sales), and what changes next month. If it can't tie spend to results, it's not a report. It's a receipt.
What this means for you
- Impressions, reach and rankings are inputs. Calls, forms, bookings and revenue are outputs. Insist on outputs first, inputs as explanation.
- Cost per lead is the number that lets you decide anything. It should be on the first page, per channel, month over month.
- A report without a 'what we're changing' section means nobody's steering. Activity without adjustment is just spending.
- You should be able to understand it in five minutes without a marketing vocabulary. If you can't, that's a choice the agency made.
Every agency sends a report. Most of them are designed to look like a lot happened. Impressions up. Reach up. Rankings up for keywords you’ve never heard of. Fourteen pages, and you still don’t know whether it was worth the money.
Here’s what a report should do, so you know what to ask for, from us or anyone else.
Three questions, first page
What did we spend? Fees and ad spend, separately, per channel.
What did it produce? Calls, form submissions, bookings, purchases. By source, so you can see which channel is earning its keep. Then the number that matters most: cost per lead, per channel, this month against the last three.
What’s changing next month? The specific adjustments being made because of these numbers. New pages, paused keywords, new creative, a shifted budget. If this section is missing, nobody is steering.
If those three are on page one in plain language, everything else in the report is supporting detail.
The numbers that explain, not decide
Rankings, traffic, impressions, click-through rates, engagement. These are useful for understanding why leads moved, and they belong in a report. They just don’t belong on top, and they shouldn’t be presented as results in themselves. “Rankings improved” means nothing if the phone didn’t ring more.
Why most reports can’t do this
Because tracking wasn’t set up. To tie a call to a Google Ad or a form to an SEO page, you need call tracking numbers, form tracking, and a consistent way of tagging where each lead came from. Setting that up is week-one work for a serious provider. If it wasn’t done, no report can honestly answer the second question, and you’ll get impressions instead.
What “plain English” actually means
You should be able to read the report in five minutes, without a glossary, and know whether to continue, change, or stop. Jargon in a client report is a choice. Sometimes it’s a habit. Sometimes it’s cover. Either way, you’re allowed to send it back.
The call matters more than the PDF
A report is a conversation starter. Twenty minutes each month to walk through the three questions, hear what the numbers mean, and decide together what happens next. That’s where an agency earns the fee, and it’s the part we’d never skip.
What to do this week
- 01Ask your current provider for last month's leads by source and the cost per lead for each. If they can't produce it in a day, that's your answer.
- 02Set up call tracking and form tracking so every lead has a source. Without it, no report can be honest.
- 03Agree on the three numbers you'll judge the work on. Write them at the top of every report.
- 04Book a 20-minute call each month to walk through the report. The conversation is where the decisions happen.
