What should a monthly marketing report contain?

The five things that belong in it

Outcomes first, in your language not the platform’s. Bookings, qualified leads, orders, revenue. Match them against your CRM or your store rather than the ad dashboard, because the two numbers will disagree with each other and only one of them is the account that actually takes your customers’ payments at the end of the month.

Cost per outcome next, trended over at least six months. A single month means very little. The line over half a year is the part that tells you whether this is genuinely working.

Then what actually changed. Campaigns launched, pages published, tests run, budgets shifted, every item carrying a date, because this section is precisely where an honest report stops resembling a decorated one that quietly restates the plan you already agreed to months earlier.

What was learned, the things that failed included. A month where two tests lost is a useful month if the losses are documented. And finally next month’s plan, with the reasoning attached, so you can hold it against what actually happens.

What to take out

Impressions, reach and follower counts as headline numbers. They belong in an appendix if anywhere. Average keyword position across a basket of terms someone chose to flatter the chart. Engagement rate with no connection to anything commercial.

Screenshots of dashboards pasted at full size. Slides restating the strategy you agreed six months ago. Anything the reader cannot act on.

Here is a useful filter. For each number on the page, ask what decision would actually change if it moved, and when the honest answer is nothing at all, the number is decoration, which is what most of the report turns out to be once you look. Everyone involved knows it. That is why nobody reads past slide four.

Making the meeting useful

Send the report at least a day before the call. Reading it aloud in the meeting wastes the only hour you get with the people doing the work.

Then spend the call on decisions. What are we stopping? What are we doubling? What is the one experiment for next month? Half an hour of that beats ninety minutes of slide narration, and it changes the agency’s behaviour too, because they start preparing for questions instead of preparing a document.

Keep a running list of decisions with dates. Six months later it is the most valuable document in the relationship, and it settles most disagreements about what was agreed.