What Should Your Agency Report Every Month?

A monthly report should tell you what you spent, what it produced and what happens next. Use this checklist to see if yours does.

You should be able to read your monthly report in a few minutes and know whether your marketing is working. If you need a meeting to understand it, or it is mostly charts of traffic, it is not doing its job.

The Monthly Report Checklist

Total spend, split into ad spend and management fees
Leads, split into calls, form submissions and other actions you agreed to count
Qualified leads, where your team records them
Cost per lead and cost per qualified lead
Leads by source, such as Google Ads, organic search, maps, email and social
A comparison with last month and the same month last year
The work completed this month, in plain language
What is planned for next month and why
Anything that needs a decision from you

Numbers That Are Context, Not Results

Traffic, impressions, rankings and click-through rates are useful for the person running the campaigns. They help explain why leads went up or down. They are not results on their own, so they should sit below the lead numbers, not above them.

Be Realistic About Tracking

No report can connect every sale to a single ad or search. Customers call from a business card, come in after seeing a sign or search again weeks later. A good report says what is tracked, what is estimated and what is not, and does not claim credit it cannot show.

Red Flags

No lead numbers, only traffic and rankings
Ad spend that does not match what the platforms charged you
The same work listed month after month
Every month described as a success
No next steps, or next steps with no reason behind them
You cannot see the underlying accounts yourself

See an Example

We show a sample of our own monthly report on the Why SP Marketing page. If you are thinking about changing agencies, also read what to check before switching marketing agencies.