What a marketing report should show an owner who has no time

The agency's report runs to twenty pages, and none of them says whether the phone rang. A marketing report for an owner with no time should answer four questions on one page. How many enquiries came from each source? How many were answered? How many became quotes, and how many became orders? Add what you spent on each source, then a single line at the bottom saying what the owner should decide. If a report cannot be read in five minutes and acted on, it is for the agency's comfort, not yours.

What goes in the four columns

Each source gets one row. A source is where the person heard of you: search, the listing, a marketplace, a dealer, a referral, a walk-in, a social post.

Enquiries is the count of people who contacted you with a real need. Drop job seekers, vendors selling to you and obvious wrong numbers, and say how many you dropped.

Answered is how many got a reply, and how fast. A pile of enquiries nobody answered tells you about your handling, not the channel. Our note on responding to a new lead explains why this column earns its place.

Quotes is how many got a price or a proposal. Orders is how many said yes, with the value if you track it.

The pattern across columns is the report. A source with many enquiries and few quotes is attracting the wrong people. A source with many quotes and few orders points to price or follow-up. A source with few enquiries and many orders may deserve more money.

A layout you can copy

These figures are invented, to show how a filled page reads: search brings the most enquiries and the dearest orders, and only 48 of its 60 were answered the same day. Replace them with your own counts.

Two rules for the table. Include a row for "do not know", because some enquiries cannot be traced, and hiding them flatters the sources you can trace. And fill in "cost per order" only where there is an order. Dividing spend by zero orders is not a result, it is a warning, and the report should say so in words.

Our piece on attributing orders to a source shows how to get the "how did you hear of us" column filled honestly.

The decision line

Under the table, write one line: what should the owner decide this time? Examples: move the spend from the marketplace to the listing; chase the eleven quotes open for over two weeks; stop the advertisement that sends job seekers.

If the report has no decision, either nothing needs changing or nobody has read it hard enough. Say which. A report that ends with "all channels performing well" and no numbers to back it is a mood, not a report.

What to leave out of the front page

Put these on a second sheet for the person running the channel, and keep them away from the owner's page: impressions, reach, clicks, click-through rate, followers, bounce rate and time on page. They help whoever tunes the advertisement. They do not tell you whether the business grew.

The full advertising report, with every platform figure, is for the person running the campaigns. This post is the owner's page only.

Clicks up, orders flat: a plywood dealer in Nellore

A plywood and laminate dealer in Nellore, in an invented case, receives a report from the agency that runs the search advertising. It shows clicks, impressions and a "conversions" figure that counts every form fill and every tap on the phone number. The numbers rise and the owner feels good. Orders do not rise.

The owner asks for one change: add the sheet from the counter. The sales coordinator logs each enquiry with its source, whether it was answered, whether a quote went and whether it closed. Next to the agency's numbers, the picture is different. Search sends many calls, but most ask the price of a single sheet. The listing and two carpenter contractors send fewer enquiries and most of the orders.

Nothing was wrong with the clicks. They simply measured something other than orders. The owner moves ₹10,000 of the search budget to a page for contractors buying by the lorry-load and asks the two contractors what they need. Two months later the contractor page has brought four enquiries and one order, which is less than hoped, while search orders drop by one. The report now shows the owner what the trade-off is, instead of hiding it.

How to build it without software

Start with a sheet that has one row per enquiry, with these columns: date, name, phone, source, answered yes or no, quote yes or no, order yes or no, value. At the end of each reporting period, count by source with a filter or a pivot. That takes less than an hour with a clean sheet. Add a dashboard tool only when the counting becomes the problem, not before.

If your sources cannot be traced because calls come in without any marker, a tracking number per source helps, and so does asking every caller. Skip any report that you cannot check against your own record.

Ask for this page on top

If your report runs to many pages, ask for this one on top and keep the rest as an appendix. No enquiry sheet yet? Start it today, because nothing else gives the report its meaning. When the agency's figure for a source differs from yours, ask them to explain the row. If the counting outgrows the spreadsheet, campaign analytics and performance reporting is the related work, and marketing is the wider section. To talk about your own report, tell us what you need.