How to Read a Marketing Report

What a report is for

A marketing report exists to answer one question for the owner: did the money produce jobs, and at what cost per job. Most reports answer a different question, whether the vendor was busy, with numbers that go up when the vendor works and cannot go down, which is why they are chosen. The tell is easy to spot. A number an owner cannot turn into a job, a call, or a dollar is a vendor’s number, not the shop’s.

The sample

Below is a typical monthly report for a local service business, with illustrative figures. The struck rows are the ones to read past. The rest are the report.

Why the struck rows are struck

Impressions and reach count people who saw something, most of them by accident, none of them on the phone. Engagement rate is a ratio of two of those numbers, so the owner cannot use it either. Website sessions are closer, but a session that does not call or fill out a form is a stranger who left. Rankings move up and down every week, a ranking that produces no click is not a lead, and that is why the report should count the calls instead. Posts published is a count of the vendor’s activity, and activity is what the fee bought; it is not what the fee was for.

Why the rest stay

Calls from the listing and form requests are demand the business can hear. Booked jobs are the ones that turned into money. Spend divided by booked jobs is the number the owner carries into the vendor call, the same number that goes on the year-end sheet. Reviews and rating are the asset that keeps working after the fee stops, and town pages published is the one activity number that survives, because a page is an owned asset with a measurable job count of its own.

What to say to the vendor

Ask for the report to lead with the bottom eight rows and put the rest in an appendix, or drop them. A vendor that pushes back is telling the owner which rows it expected to be judged on, useful to know before the next invoice. Ask for the calls and forms to be counted from tracking numbers, not estimated. Ask for the same rows every month in the same order, so the twelve reports of a year stack into a line instead of twelve arguments about what the numbers meant.

Where the report goes wrong even when the rows are right

The booked-jobs row depends on the office tagging jobs by source. If the vendor supplies that count, it is counting its own work, and the row is an estimate dressed as a measurement. The count has to come from the shop’s scheduling software, the vendor’s report has to match it, and where the two disagree the shop’s number is the one that goes on the sheet.