Notes for owners · Business growth
What a monthly advertising report should contain
One page at the front: what was spent, what came in, what each enquiry and order cost, what changed, and what changes next. The forty slides behind it are an appendix.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
A monthly advertising report is one page. What was spent against what was planned, how many enquiries arrived and from where, and what each enquiry and each order cost. How fast those enquiries were answered, what was changed last month and what that did, and the one change proposed for next month. Everything behind that page is an appendix. If the owner has to read past page one to know whether the month was good, the report has been written for the agency rather than for the business.
The front page, line by line
| Line | What it says |
|---|---|
| Spend against plan | What each channel was given and what it actually used |
| Enquiries by source | Counted in your CRM, with an unassigned row left visible |
| Quality | How many of those enquiries were real buyers, marked by the sales team |
| Cost per enquiry and per order | By channel, not blended into one figure |
| Reply time | Median hours from enquiry arriving to a human replying |
| Last month's change | What was changed, and what happened |
| Next month's change | One change, with the reason |
Six of those come from your own systems. Only the first comes from the agency, which is the correct balance and the opposite of how most reporting is arranged.
Write the page for the person who has to decide something. An owner reading it on a phone between two meetings should be able to say, by the end of it, whether to keep spending at this level, and on what. If your report needs a presenter in the room to make sense, it is a presentation. You cannot read a presentation back in March to settle an argument about September.
Enquiries by source, including the ones you cannot trace
Insist on the unassigned row. A report where every single enquiry has a neat source has been tidied, and the tidying always favours whichever channel is being defended that month.
Sources must be named the same way in every report. When last month said "Facebook" and this month says "Meta paid", the trend line is fiction. One naming list, one owner, and the same words in the CRM as in the report.
Walk-ins and phone calls belong in this table too. A retail business that reports only what arrived through the website is reporting the smallest part of its own demand.
The column that turns a report into a decision
Enquiries are not the outcome. Put four columns beside each source: enquiries, qualified, quoted, ordered. The first comes from the form or the phone; the other three come from a person in sales marking them.
This is where reports change minds. A channel producing sixty cheap enquiries and one order is worse than a channel producing nine expensive ones and four, and no platform dashboard will ever tell you that. For example, a builder finds that portal enquiries are a third the cost of the ones from search and that none of them turned up for a site visit. The cheap source is the expensive one.
Ask the sales team for one written line per channel on what the enquiries were like. It takes them two minutes and it is the most useful sentence in the document.
What the offline lines have to carry
Every offline row needs evidence attached to the same report, not promised separately. A dated photograph of the hoarding taken from the approaching carriageway. The broadcast certificate for the radio flight, with the times the spots actually ran. The copy of the page for a press insertion. The screen log for a digital panel. The count of scans against the code that only that panel carried.
Agree this before booking. Proof of execution asked for after a cycle has ended tends not to exist.
The numbers that should not be on the front page
Impressions, reach and engagement rate as headline figures. Follower growth. A list of activity: twelve posts published, four articles written, eight creatives designed. Screenshots of dashboards pasted into slides. Keyword rankings for terms nobody in your trade searches.
None of these are worthless, and all of them belong in the appendix. On the front page they do one job, which is to fill the space where the cost per order should be.
Be equally suspicious of one blended cost per lead across all media. It hides the channel that is carrying the average and the channel that is dragging it.
Comparisons that are fair, and the two that are not
Compare this month against the same month last year for anything seasonal. Comparing Ashada against Dasara and calling it a decline is not analysis, it is a calendar.
Compare against the baseline recorded before the work started. We record one at the beginning of every engagement, enquiries by source, reply time, conversion and cost per order, and every monthly report is read against it. Without a baseline, a good month and a lucky month look identical.
The unfair comparison is a fresh month against a settled one. Conversions keep arriving against clicks from previous weeks, so a report pulled on the second working day will always look worse than the same month re-read a fortnight later. Same day each month, every month.
Five questions to ask in the meeting
- What did we change last month, and what did it do?
- Which line would you cut first if the budget dropped by a fifth?
- Which enquiries did sales say were useless, and what do those have in common?
- What are we not measuring at all right now?
- What do you need from us that you did not get this month?
The fifth question is the one that prevents most agency arguments. The usual answers are creative approvals sitting for eleven days and nobody answering the campaign phone on Sundays, and both of those are yours to fix.
Campaign analytics and performance reporting is the service that builds this and keeps it honest month after month.
What to do next
Take last month's report and try to fill the seven lines of the front page from it. Whatever you cannot fill is the brief for next month's report, and you can send that brief to your agency this afternoon.