What a marketing agency should put in your monthly report in India, and the twelve lines that make padding obvious

A monthly marketing report has to answer four questions and most of them answer one. What did we spend, what did it produce, what work was done, and what changes next month. If a report tells you the spend and the impressions but not the enquiries, it has answered one of four and filled the rest with charts. The fastest way to fix this is to hand your agency the twelve item list below and ask them to report against it in that order every month, because a standard you set is a standard they cannot design around.

This is written for an Indian business paying a retainer, with the invoice, the media spend and the enquiry channels that Indian buyers actually use in mind.

The twelve items, in the order they should appear

Six report items that look like work and are not

• Impressions and reach as a headline. They measure how much inventory was bought, and our page on why impressions are not traffic shows the size of the gap using our own two numbers. Ask for impressions in a supporting table and enquiries at the top.
• An unlabelled percentage. Up 42 per cent is not a number until you know 42 per cent of what, over which window, against which baseline.
• Optimisation completed. If item 7 lists the actual changes with dates, this line is redundant. If it does not, this line is the whole report.
• Engagement rate on organic social, for a business selling to other businesses. It is real and it is not your buying signal unless a customer told you it was.
• Keyword rankings with no traffic column. A keyword moving from 40 to 22 changes nothing on its own. Rank plus the clicks it produced is a finding.
• A month on month comparison across unequal months. Festival months, exam months and the monsoon are not comparable to each other, and a monthly daily average hides a very good week inside an average one, which our page on what a monthly average cannot tell you works through.

The India specific items most reports leave out

Four things are routinely missing from agency reports here, and each one is a real number that changes a decision.

• Phone and WhatsApp enquiries. A large share of Indian enquiries arrive as a call or a chat message, and no advertising platform can count them. If the report has a form fills row and nothing else, it is reporting the smaller half. Ask for calls and chats counted from the phone and the business account, even if they have to be counted by hand.
• Fee and media spend on separate lines, matching the invoice. A single blended figure makes cost per enquiry impossible to compute and makes it impossible to see whether the fee moved.
• Regional language performance, where you advertise in more than one. A campaign running in English and one Indian language has two cost per enquiry figures and reporting one average wastes the finding.
• Marketplace and aggregator channels, if you sell on them. Those enquiries and orders belong in the same table as your own site, because the decision is where the next rupee goes and the comparison has to be like for like.

How to score it, in ten minutes a month

Mark each of the twelve items pass, partial or fail. Pass means a number with a source and a window. Partial means the number is there and you cannot tell where it came from. Fail means the item is absent.

• Nine or more passes is a reporting relationship that is working. Spend the review meeting on the plan rather than on the numbers.
• Five to eight is normal in the first quarter. Name the three worst items and ask for them next month in writing.
• Fewer than five, twice in a row, is a measurement problem rather than a performance problem, and no amount of extra spend will fix it. Fix items 1, 2, 3 and 9 before judging anything else.

Keep one rule in the review meeting. A missing number and a bad number are different findings. A missing number means nobody knows; a bad number means somebody does, and told you. Agencies that bring you a bad number early are usually the ones worth keeping.

Questions Indian business owners ask about agency reporting

How long should a monthly marketing report be

Two to four pages, plus appendices anybody can ignore. The twelve items above fit on two pages if each one is a number and a sentence. A forty slide deck is usually a sign that the first three items are weak.

Should the agency or my team own the reporting

The agency reports and you verify, which only works if the accounts are in your name and you can open them yourself. Agree that on the first day, because an account you do not own is a report you cannot check.

What if my sales cycle is six months and monthly revenue means nothing

Then item 5 becomes qualified pipeline rather than closed revenue, and you agree the definition of qualified in writing before the first month. Everything else on the list works unchanged.

Is a dashboard better than a written report

A dashboard is better for the numbers and worse for items 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11, which are judgements rather than metrics. Most good arrangements are a live dashboard plus one page of writing a month.

The agency says some of this cannot be tracked. What then

Then item 9 is the most valuable line in the report, because knowing exactly which enquiries are invisible tells you how much of the rest to trust. Ask for the gap to be named and sized rather than smoothed over.

Can I ask for the raw data

Yes, and the request is reasonable. A platform export and a list of claimed enquiries with dates and sources is the minimum, and it is what lets you match their count against your own records.

The report line nobody is sending you yet

There is one channel no monthly report covers, and it is the one where a buyer reads a short list of firms and never visits a website. When somebody types your whole requirement into ChatGPT or Gemini, the answer names some businesses and not others, and nothing in a Google Ads export or an analytics property records it. In 50 blind India readings we took on 22 October 2026, with the country named in the wording of every question, a business was named in the answer text in 19 of them. Whether your name is one of those is a line worth adding to the twelve above, and it is the reading AI Knows Us was built to take.