The monthly report to demand from a marketing agency, and the parts that are padding

A monthly marketing report has to answer three questions on its first page. What changed, with dates and links. What that produced, against a number that existed before the work started. What happens next month and why that rather than something else. A report that answers those three is short, and every section that does not serve one of them is padding. The clearest symptom of padding is a metric with no decision attached to it, and the most common example is a page of impressions.

The four sections that earn their place

1. The change log

A dated list of every change made, each one linked to the thing that changed. A published page gets its live URL. A technical fix gets the page it was applied to. An advert gets the campaign name. A change to a bid strategy gets the date and the old and new setting.

This is the only section that proves work happened, and it is the one most often missing. You should be able to click any line and see the result on your own property.

2. Results against a baseline that predates the work

One table, with the measure, the figure for the month, the figure for the same month before the engagement began, and the figure for the previous month. Three columns, because one month on its own says nothing about direction and a year on year comparison hides a bad quarter.

Pick measures that end in money or in an enquiry. Qualified enquiries, booked calls, orders, revenue, cost per acquisition. Rankings and sessions belong lower down the page as explanation, not at the top as the result.

3. The decision log

Two or three lines per month saying what the agency concluded and what it decided to do about it. "Search terms show we are paying for three competitor names, so we added them as negatives on 14 October" is a decision. "Continued optimisation" is not.

A decision log is also the cheapest protection you have during a handover, because it is the only part of the work that lives in somebody's head rather than in a platform.

4. Next month, with a named owner and a dependency

Three to five items, each with the person who will do it and the thing you must supply. Most slipped months are caused by an approval nobody chased, and a plan that names your side of the work makes that visible in week one rather than in week four.

The padding list

• Impressions, reach and views. These count how many times something could have been seen. They move when a platform changes a feed and they move when somebody buys more inventory, so on their own they report nothing you decided.
• Average ranking position across all keywords. One average hides the only two things that matter, which are the handful of commercial phrases you want and whether they moved.
• Hours worked and tasks completed. Input volume. An agency that reports hours is asking to be judged on effort.
• Follower counts. Unless you sell through that account, the number has no path to revenue.
• Total traffic with branded searches included. People searching your company name were already yours. Branded and non branded belong in separate rows, always.
• Screenshots of a dashboard. An image of a chart is the agency showing you it has access. It is not an interpretation.
• A list of content published, with no performance attached. Publication is in the change log. Performance belongs in the results table, even when the answer is that a page has done nothing yet.

A dashboard is data access, not a report

Plenty of agencies now send a live dashboard link instead of a document, and a dashboard is a useful thing to have. It is not the report, because it contains no interpretation and no decision, and reading one is work the agency was paid to do.

When a dashboard arrives in place of a report, ask for three sentences to go with it. What is the one number on here that is different from last month. What caused it. What are you doing because of it. If those three sentences cannot be written, the dashboard is measuring things nobody is acting on, and that is the finding.

The numbers you can verify without the agency

Every figure in an agency report should be reproducible from a system you control. Keep the accounts in your own name and your own billing, and check these yourself before the call.

When a report quotes a figure that exists only in the agency's own spreadsheet, ask which system it came from. That one question resolves most reporting disputes in a single email.

The British specifics worth settling in the contract

• Account ownership. Advertising accounts, analytics property, Search Console and the Business Profile in your company's name, with the agency as a user. This is the single most expensive thing to fix after a relationship ends.
• Reporting day. A named working day each month, not "early in the month". Put it beside the invoice date.
• Fee and media separated on the invoice. One line for the agency fee, one for media passed through, with VAT shown. A single blended figure makes it impossible to see what you are paying for management.
• Who may deploy a change. If the agency cannot publish to your site without waiting on your developer, say so in the contract and expect the change log to be shorter.
• Data handling. Where customer data is processed and by whom, written down, because the agency is handling personal data on your behalf.

The one page version

If you want to replace a twenty page deck with something better, ask for this and nothing else.

• Three enquiry or revenue numbers, each with the pre engagement figure beside it.
• Every change made this month, dated and linked.
• Two decisions taken, in plain sentences.
• Three things next month, each with an owner and a dependency.
• One thing that did not work, and what was changed because of it.

The last line is the one that tells you most about an agency. A report with no failures in it after six months is a report that has stopped looking.

Questions about marketing agency reporting

How long should a monthly report be?

Two pages of substance beats twenty of charts. The length that matters is the change log, which grows with the work actually done.

Is it reasonable to ask for a weekly report?

Weekly suits paid media, where spend decisions are frequent, and it suits almost nothing else. For search and content, a monthly report with a short weekly note on anything urgent gives you the same control without paying for reporting time.

Our agency says enquiries are not its responsibility because sales closes them. Is that fair?

Partly. Hold the agency to qualified enquiries and let the sales conversation be yours, but agree the definition of qualified in writing in month one. Most arguments about lead quality are arguments about an undefined word.

Should the agency report on competitors?

One page, quarterly, when it changes a decision you would otherwise make. Monthly competitor monitoring usually produces interesting reading and no decisions.

What do we do if the report has no change log?

Ask for one covering the last three months, dated and linked. It is assembled from records the agency already holds, so a request that cannot be met is itself the answer to your question.

The line that is missing from almost every agency report

A monthly report tells you what Google and the ad platforms did with your business. It does not tell you what an assistant says when somebody types your buying question into ChatGPT or Gemini, which is now part of how a shortlist gets made and is reported by nobody, because no platform in that list sends anyone a dashboard. AI Knows Us measures that one line across five surfaces, including Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and it belongs in the same monthly document as everything above rather than in a separate conversation once a year. The method and the counting rule behind figures like those are set out in the 597 reading benchmark, and the British agency reporting context is in the note on UK agency rules.