Measurement
What a monthly marketing report should include: five numbers
Published by Zubair Afzal, responsible editor
First published Updated 5 min read
Lead with the numbers that touch money
Most marketing reports open with sessions, impressions, rankings and followers: the numbers furthest from revenue and closest to effort, which is why they lead.
Five numbers do the job better: enquiries by source, qualified enquiries, cost per qualified enquiry, work won and its value, and time to first response. Together they say whether the month produced anything, whether it was any good, what it cost, what it turned into, and whether the business handled it well.
Everything else goes behind them, not deleted, just demoted to where somebody can look if a front-page number moved.
The five
What each number is, and how each one gets dressed up
In this order, because each one is only meaningful once the one above it is defined.
Enquiries by source
Every call, form, message and booking, grouped by where it came from, taken from your forms, call tracking and inbox, not a platform’s conversion column. The usual distortion is counting events instead of people, so one person who fills in a form and then phones becomes two.
Qualified enquiries
The subset that was a real prospect for work you do, under a written definition agreed before the month starts and left alone. The usual distortion is a definition that quietly widens in a weak month, which is why it belongs in the report itself.
Cost per qualified enquiry
Everything spent on marketing that month, including fees and your own time if you count it, divided by qualified enquiries. The usual distortion is leaving fees out of the numerator so the figure reflects media only, which makes an expensive supplier look like a cheap channel.
Work won, and what it was worth
How many became customers and what they’re worth, tied back to source where the record allows, from the CRM or invoicing system. The usual distortion is silence: won work is the number most often missing, because it needs somebody to keep a record, not a tool to be set up.
Time to first response
How long an enquiry waits before a human replies, measured as a median and a worst case. Costs nothing to measure and sits outside marketing, which is why nobody reports it. It regularly explains more about a bad month than anything done to the website.
What to demote
The usual headline, and what to put in its place
None of the left column is worthless. All of it’s in the wrong place.
| Dimension | Why it’s a poor headline | Put this in front of it |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions and users | Rises with anything, including a mention that sends the wrong people. | Enquiries by source, which tells you whether any of that traffic wanted something. |
| Keyword rankings | There’s always a set of terms where the news is good. | Qualified enquiries, which can’t be selected after the fact. |
| Impressions and reach | Measures how much was shown, not whether anyone acted. | Cost per qualified enquiry, which prices the activity for real. |
| Total leads | Includes spam, duplicates, suppliers and existing customers. | Work won and its value, which is the number that pays for the month. |
How to run it
Monthly, on one page, with the definitions printed on it
Print the definition of a qualified enquiry on the report itself, every month. It sounds pedantic, but it does more than any other change to keep reporting straight, because a reprinted definition can’t move unnoticed.
Add one paragraph saying what changed and why, written by a person who knows, and a short list of what happens next month. That’s the whole report.
Read three months together, not one. A single month of any of these numbers is mostly noise, especially in a business that sells a handful of large jobs.
Questions
Common questions about marketing reporting
Are five numbers enough?
For the first page, yes. Everything else belongs behind them as supporting detail for whoever wants to look.
The front page answers one question: was this month better or worse, and why? Twenty numbers can’t answer that. Five can.
What if we can’t measure some of them yet?
Say so in the report, where the number would have been. A number labelled missing is fine. A missing number quietly replaced by a proxy starts a year of confusion.
Then fix them in order of cost. Time to first response is usually free. Source attribution needs tracking work. Won value needs somebody to update the CRM, the hardest of the three because it’s a habit, not a setting.
Should rankings be in the report at all?
As supporting detail, yes, because a ranking movement is often the earliest visible sign of something changing. As a headline, no.
As a headline, rankings can improve on terms no valuable customer searches, and there’s always a set of terms where the news is good.
Who should decide what counts as qualified?
Whoever answers the phone, with the owner in the room. It has to be written down and it has to be boring: in the area you serve, for work you do, above a minimum value, not an existing customer, not a supplier.
Then leave the definition alone for at least six months. A moving definition makes the trend meaningless and is the easiest way to make a bad quarter look acceptable.
How long should the report be?
One page for the five numbers, a paragraph saying what changed and why, and a short list of what happens next month. Everything else is an appendix.
If a supplier can’t compress the month into that, it’s usually because the month doesn’t compress well, and that’s worth discussing.
References
Sources for what should a marketing report include
The official documents and research this page is based on. Platform rules change, so check the source before you act on a detail.
Related
Keep reading on what should a marketing report include
Start here
Send us a report you can’t read
If you get a monthly report and can’t tell from it whether the month was good, send it over. We’ll tell you which numbers in it are load bearing and which are decoration, whether or not you ever become a client.
Rather check it yourself? Try our free SEO tools