What a Good Marketing Report Should Actually Tell You
By Rhyley Cant ·
A lot of agency reports are designed to look busy, not to be useful. Pages of charts, a sea of metrics, and somehow you still can't answer the only question that matters: is this making me money?
Vanity metrics vs money metrics
Impressions, clicks and reach are inputs. They're useful for diagnosing, but they're not the point. A good report leads with the outcomes: leads generated, cost per lead, sales, and return on spend.
- How many qualified leads did we generate?
- What did each lead cost?
- How many turned into customers?
- What was the return on every dollar spent?
Context beats raw numbers
'47 leads' means nothing on its own. '47 leads, up 30% on last month, at a 20% lower cost' tells a story you can act on. Good reporting always shows the trend and the comparison.
If you can't tell whether your marketing is profitable from the report, it's the wrong report.
Keep it human
The best reports come with a plain-English summary: what we did, what happened, and what we're doing next. You shouldn't need a marketing degree to understand where your money went.
