Your Marketing Report Is Lying to You. Here Is What to Ask For Instead.

A report exists to help you make a decision. If you finish reading it and do not know what to do differently, it was a brochure, not a report.

The four questions

1. How many leads did we get? Calls, forms and chats, de-duplicated, with spam removed.
2. What did each one cost? Total spend including fees, divided by qualified leads.
3. Where did they come from? Organic, paid, referral, direct. Call tracking and form attribution make this possible.
4. What changes next month? The two or three actions the numbers justify.

What to cut

Impressions, average position, bounce rate, follower growth and anything shown without a comparison period. Keep sessions only as a sanity check on tracking.

Ask your agency for this format. If they cannot produce it, the problem is usually tracking, and tracking is the first thing to fix.