Most agency monthly reports are 30 slides long and tell you almost nothing. The goal of a long report is often to obscure the short version: did this money produce revenue or not?
The one question every report should answer on page one
Cost per booked job. Or cost per signed case. Or cost per new patient. Whatever the currency your business actually runs on. If the report leads with sessions, impressions, keyword rankings, or rank improvements — the agency is optimizing for the wrong scoreboard.
A healthy monthly report structure:
- Page 1: Revenue impact. Booked jobs / signed cases / new patients by channel, cost per booked job by channel, trend vs. last month and last quarter.
- Pages 2–3: Channel detail. What moved, what didn't, what they're testing next.
- Appendix: Vanity metrics. Sessions, rankings, impressions — still useful context, but not the headline.
Reports structured in the opposite order (vanity first, revenue in an appendix or nowhere) are a warning sign in themselves.
The three sentences that tell you the report is honest
1. "Here's what didn't work this month."
Every real operator has a bad week. Every honest agency has a bad month once in a while. If every report is net-positive in every channel forever, either the business is an anomaly or the reporting is selectively sliced. The former is rare; the latter is common.
2. "We spent $X across Y channels; here's revenue by channel."
If the report doesn't show spend alongside revenue, the ROI numbers are unfalsifiable. $500 of spend returning $2,000 is different from $50,000 of spend returning $200,000 — even though both are "4x ROI." You need to see both halves of the ratio.
3. "Our recommendation this month is..."
A real agency has an opinion every month. Maybe it's shifting budget out of a softening channel, maybe it's doubling down on a winning ad group, maybe it's freezing SEO work while a site redesign lands. A report with no recommendation is a status update from a bystander — not a program being actively managed.
Red flags, in order of severity
- Rankings lead, revenue absent. The account is being run for rankings, not revenue. Expect a slow degrade.
- Attribution is "Google Analytics + form fills." Form fills aren't jobs. You're paying for the gap.
- "Impressions up 340%." Impressions aren't money. This is a vanity slide dressed as a headline.
- No competitor or market context. Good reports put performance in market context. Was CPC up across the category this month? Did a competitor enter the auction? Silence on this means the agency isn't watching.
- The deck is 40+ pages. If it takes 40 pages to explain the work, either the work wasn't focused or the report is designed to look thorough rather than be useful.
What to ask if the report is thin
- What's our cost per booked job / signed case this month, across all channels combined?
- What would you cut if you had to reduce spend by 30% next month?
- If you were scaling us up 2x, what's the first place you'd add budget?
Those three questions pressure-test whether the agency is actually managing the program or just reporting on what happened.