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Strategy & Craft
Reporting people actually read
A forty-page monthly report is a way of not being read. One page, five numbers, and three sentences that say what changes.
Key points
- A report that recommends nothing is a data dump.
- Show trend against the same month last year, not against last month.
- Name what went wrong before someone finds it.
Marketing reports fail in a specific way: they document activity thoroughly and say nothing about what should happen next. They are read once, filed, and never referenced.
The one-page structure
Line 1: the headline. One sentence stating whether the month was good, bad or flat, and why.
Block 2: the five numbers. Enquiries, cost per enquiry, close rate, cost per customer, revenue from advertising. Each with the same month last year beside it.
Block 3: what changed. Two or three bullets naming specific causes: a campaign launched, a competitor's price change, a channel that broke.
Block 4: what we recommend. Two or three actions with owners and dates. This is the only part that justifies the report existing.
Appendix: everything else, for whoever wants it.
If the recommendation section is empty, the report was an exercise in documentation. Send the numbers and skip the document.
Compare against last year, not last month
Month-on-month comparison in most businesses measures seasonality, not performance. A roofing firm's October is always better than its February, and reporting that as improvement is meaningless.
Year-on-year for the same month removes the seasonal effect and reveals the trajectory. Where the previous year is unavailable, use a rolling three-month average.
Report the bad news first
The most useful discipline in reporting is naming problems before anyone asks. It costs nothing, it builds credibility, and it prevents the conversation in which a director finds a number the report avoided.
The format: what went wrong, what caused it, what we are doing, and by when we will know whether that worked.
What to leave out
| Common inclusion | Why to remove |
|---|---|
| Screenshots of every advert | nobody reads them |
| Platform engagement scores | not comparable, not actionable |
| A list of tasks completed | describes effort, not result |
| Follower counts | correlate with nothing |
| Fourteen charts of the same data | pads the document |
The presentation format
If the report is presented rather than sent, the rule tightens further: three slides. Where we are, what changed, what we propose. Everything else answers questions if they arise.
A presented report that runs longer than fifteen minutes has stopped being a decision meeting and become a briefing.
The quarterly exception
Once a quarter a longer document is worth producing, because the questions are different: what have we learned, which assumptions turned out wrong, and what should we stop doing.
That document is read, because it asks questions people care about rather than reciting numbers they have already seen.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a monthly report be?
One page plus an appendix nobody is required to read.
Who should write it?
Whoever will be asked to act on it. Reports written by the agency for the agency's benefit describe activity, not results.
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