Reading a Report From an Agency

The report that says nothing

Twelve pages, several charts, impressions up, reach up, engagement up, keywords tracked, and a summary saying progress continues.

The business reads it, finds nothing to object to, files it, and remains unable to say whether the arrangement is working.

That is not usually dishonesty. Reports get built from what the tools export easily, which is activity, and the number the client cares about is frequently not in any tool the agency has.

Which means the fix is asking better questions rather than doubting the supplier.

The six questions

• What did you do this month, specifically.
• What did it produce in enquiries or sales.
• What did you try that did not work.
• What are you doing next, and why that.
• What would you do with more budget, and with less.
• What is the biggest problem you cannot fix from your side.

The third is the most revealing. A supplier who never reports anything that failed is either not testing or not telling you, and both are worth knowing.

Ask for enquiries, not proxies

The single change that transforms these reports.

Impressions, reach, clicks, rankings, and engagement are all steps toward the thing you want and none of them is the thing.

A report should lead with enquiries, calls, bookings, or sales, and use the other numbers to explain those.

Where the agency cannot see your enquiries, which is common, supply them: a monthly count from your side, however rough, so the report can be built against it.

That one input changes the conversation from whether traffic is up to whether the business is better off, which is the conversation you were trying to have.

The numbers that mislead

Worth recognising, not because they are dishonest but because they move for reasons unrelated to your business.

Impressions rise when a platform changes how it counts or shows things.

Rankings improve on terms nobody searches, which is easy to achieve and worth nothing.

Engagement rises when content is written to be engaged with rather than to sell.

Traffic rises from sources that never convert, including bots and referral noise.

And percentage changes look dramatic on small numbers: a rise from four to seven is seventy-five percent and is three.

Ask for absolute figures alongside percentages, always.

A worked example

A firm received a monthly report for eighteen months showing steady improvement across every metric.

Asked directly whether enquiries had increased, nobody could say, because nobody had been counting.

They started recording enquiries by month and asking callers how they found them, which took a few minutes a day.

Three months later the picture was clear: total enquiries were flat, and the growth in traffic was arriving on articles that produced nothing.

That was not the agency's fault, since nobody had ever told them enquiries were the measure and their brief had been traffic.

The brief changed, the work changed, and the reports became shorter and more useful.

The whole difference had been supplying one number.

Compare against a year ago

A small discipline that removes most of the illusion.

Month-on-month comparison rewards seasonality and short-term noise. A quiet January followed by a busier February is not progress.

The same month last year is the honest comparison for anything seasonal, and a twelve-month trend line is better than either.

Ask for both, and ask for them consistently so the basis does not change when it flatters.

A report that changes its comparison period between months is worth asking about, since the choice is usually not accidental.

Judge the plan, not the past

Where the value of the meeting actually is.

The month that has happened cannot be changed, and reviewing it in detail consumes the time available.

What matters is what happens next: what they intend to do, why they think it will work, and what they expect it to produce.

A supplier who can state an expectation before the month starts is doing something different from one who explains afterwards what occurred.

Spend a third of the meeting on the report and two thirds on the plan, and ask for the expectation in writing so next month's discussion has something to check against.

What a good report looks like

Short, and there are not many of them.

One page. Enquiries or sales at the top with the trend. What was done, in plain terms. What worked, what did not. What is next and what it should produce. One thing they need from you.

A supplier producing that is confident, and a twelve-page export is frequently a substitute for that confidence.

If you receive long reports, ask for a one-page summary in that shape rather than asking for less reporting, which suppliers reasonably resist.

Most will produce it willingly, and the exercise of writing it usually improves the work as well as the reporting.

The counter-case

Judging everything on enquiries is unfair in some situations, and it is worth acknowledging.

Work with a long payback, such as content or technical improvements, produces little for months and then compounds, and cancelling it at month four because enquiries have not moved discards the investment.

Some agencies are also being held responsible for outcomes they do not control: a business that does not answer its phone, quotes slowly, or has a poor offer will produce weak results from good marketing.

And demanding attribution certainty that does not exist pushes suppliers toward reporting the numbers that can be attributed rather than doing the work that helps.

Ask for enquiries as the headline, allow reasonable time for slow-acting work, and be honest about which side of the arrangement is the constraint.

What to ask for

1. Supply your own enquiry count monthly.
2. Ask for a one-page summary in a fixed shape.
3. Put enquiries at the top, proxies below.
4. Request absolute numbers with every percentage.
5. Compare against the same month last year.
6. Ask what did not work.
7. Get next month's expectation in writing.

Step one is what makes every other item possible, and it is the client's job rather than the agency's.

Reports built to flatter are covered in the report that made a bad decision look good.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.