Agency Audits
What Should a Digital Marketing Agency Report Every Month?
A lot of monthly marketing reports are built to be easy to produce rather than easy to act on. Here is a reasonable standard to compare yours against.
The minimum: activity and cost
- Total spend, by channel
- Leads generated, by channel
- Cost per lead
- Conversion rate at each relevant stage
- Notable search terms or audience performance, where relevant to the channel
This is table stakes. If your report does not include this, that alone is worth raising.
What separates a good report from an adequate one
Qualified leads, not just leads. Total lead count says little on its own. A report that also shows how many leads were qualified — or at least gives your team’s own read on lead quality — is more useful.
Booked opportunities and sales, where available. If your CRM can support it, the report should show what happened after the lead, not just the lead itself.
Revenue, connected back to channel where possible. This is the hardest part to do well, and it is reasonable for a report to say plainly where this cannot currently be traced, rather than omitting it or overstating what is known.
A recurring theme worth understanding: Why Google Ads Conversions Do Not Match Your Actual Sales covers why “conversions” and “revenue” often diverge even in an honest, well-run account.
Tracking limitations, stated explicitly. A good report says things like “call tracking does not currently capture calls from the mobile site” rather than silently omitting that channel’s contribution. Naming a limitation is a sign of a trustworthy report, not a weak one.
What changed, and why. Budget shifts, new campaigns paused or launched, landing pages changed — a report that explains changes in context is far more useful than one that simply restates numbers each month.
Next actions. A report without a “here is what we are doing about this next month” section is a scoreboard, not a plan.
A simple template
| Section | What it should answer |
|---|---|
| Spend and activity | What did we do and what did it cost? |
| Lead and opportunity quality | Were the results actually useful to the business? |
| Revenue connection | How much of this can be traced to actual dollars, and where does that trail stop? |
| Change log | What changed this month and why? |
| Next actions | What happens next, and why? |
If your reports do not look like this
That is not automatically a sign of a bad agency — some of this depends on what access and CRM integration is available. But it is a reasonable thing to ask for directly. If asking does not resolve it, or you want a report you did not have to negotiate for, an independent review can assess both the reporting and the underlying performance it is meant to describe.
Related reading: Who Should Own Your Google Ads Account: You or Your Agency?
More insights
Your agency report should answer your questions, not create more of them.
If you cannot connect the report you receive each month with leads, sales, and revenue inside your business, Marketing Audit Co. can independently review the reporting methodology and underlying data.