The marketing report arrives as a long slide deck, or a link to a dashboard with more charts than you can count. Impressions are up, reach is up, engagement rate is “healthy”. You read it, nod, and still cannot say whether the money you spent last month brought in customers. Or you are the one who has to write the report, and you are not sure what belongs in it.
A good monthly report fits on one page and answers a short list of questions an owner actually asks. This post gives a monthly marketing report template you can copy, explains what to include in a marketing report and what to leave out, and shows how to write the part most reports skip: what changed, and what happens next.
What the report is for
A monthly report exists to help someone decide where next month’s time and money go. If reading it does not make that easier, it is not doing its job, however polished it looks.
That means it is written for the decision-maker, usually the owner, not for the person who ran the campaigns. It should be readable without a call to explain it, and it should mention results in the same terms the business uses: enquiries, bookings, orders, customers.
A one-page monthly marketing report template
Five sections, in this order. Each one fits in a few lines or a small table.
1. Headline
Two or three sentences in plain words. How many enquiries or sales came in this month, how that compares with last month and with the same month last year, and the single most important thing that happened. If the owner reads only this, they should still know how the month went.
2. Results by source
| Source | Enquiries | Of which qualified | Customers won | Change vs last month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google search (organic) | ||||
| Google Business Profile | ||||
| Google Ads | ||||
| Facebook and Instagram ads | ||||
| Email and WhatsApp campaigns | ||||
| Referral, word of mouth, other | ||||
| Total |
The total should come from your own records, not from adding up tool reports. Our post on recording lead quality explains how to fill the qualified and won columns.
3. Spend and cost per result
For each paid channel: what was spent, how many enquiries your records attribute to it, and the cost per enquiry and per customer. Ad spend comes from the platform. Results come from your records. Mixing the platform’s own conversion count into this section makes paid channels look better than they are.
4. What changed this month
A short list of what was done and what happened outside your control. New campaigns, paused ads, pages published or rewritten, offers launched, website changes, tracking fixes, a competitor opening nearby, a festival or holiday, a slow season. Without this section, nobody remembers in six months why a month looked the way it did.
5. Next month
Two to four specific actions with a reason for each. “Move part of the Meta budget to Google Ads search, because Meta leads were mostly outside our service area” is useful. “Continue optimising campaigns” is not.
What to include in a marketing report, and what to leave out
| Belongs in the main report | Belongs in an appendix, if anywhere |
|---|---|
| Enquiries, bookings, orders by source | Impressions and reach |
| Spend and cost per enquiry for paid channels | Click-through rates and cost per click |
| Changes made and their effect | Follower counts and likes |
| Search clicks for the main service pages | Rankings for a long list of keywords |
| Tracking problems found or fixed | Engagement rate and session duration |
| Next month’s actions | Screenshots of platform dashboards |
The right-hand column is not useless. Click-through rate helps whoever writes ads; impressions help diagnose a reach problem. But these are working figures for the person doing the job, not results for the person paying for it. If they lead the report, they crowd out the question that matters.
Adapting the template to your kind of business
The five sections stay the same, but the columns in the results table should use your business’s own words.
- Online shop: replace enquiries with orders and revenue, add returns or refused cash-on-delivery orders, and list the top products by source if the numbers allow it.
- Clinic or salon: count booked appointments and, where you can, attended ones. No-shows are part of the picture.
- Trade or local service: count calls answered and quotes sent, as well as jobs won. Calls are often most of the business.
- B2B supplier: count quote requests and the value of quotes sent, since deals may close well after the month ends.
Whatever you choose, keep the columns the same from one month to the next. A report that changes shape every month cannot be compared.
Where the numbers come from
- Enquiries and sales: your inbox, call log, WhatsApp, lead sheet or CRM, and your shop’s order list.
- Sources: GA4’s traffic acquisition with key events, plus what customers told you when asked.
- Spend: Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager, for the same calendar month.
- Search: Search Console’s performance report, filtered to the pages that matter.
- Business Profile: calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile’s performance figures.
A dashboard can collect many of these automatically. Our guide to building a one-page Looker Studio dashboard covers that. The report is where someone looks at the dashboard and writes down what it means.
Writing the comparisons fairly
- Compare like with like. A festival month against a quiet month says little. Add the same month last year when you have it.
- Use words for small numbers. “Up from three enquiries to five” is honest. “Up sixty-seven per cent” for the same change is technically true and misleading.
- Look at the trend. Include the last three or more months for the headline figure, so one odd month does not drive a big decision.
- Flag tracking changes. If double counting was fixed this month, say so next to any figure it affects.
The tools will disagree about which channel deserves credit for some customers. Our post on how attribution works explains why, and why your own records should set the totals.
Red flags in a report someone sends you
If you receive reports from an agency or freelancer, these are worth questioning:
- No mention of enquiries, sales or customers at all.
- Conversion figures far higher than what you received, with no explanation.
- Totals made by adding Google Ads, Meta and GA4 results together.
- No list of what was actually done during the month.
- The same commentary every month, with only the numbers changed.
- Data you cannot check, because the accounts are not in your name.
A good provider welcomes these questions. The wider habit of reviewing results each month is set out in our guide to measuring marketing for small businesses.
Frequently asked questions
Who should write the monthly marketing report?
Whoever runs the marketing day to day usually prepares the figures, but the owner or someone who handles enquiries should add the real outcomes, such as which leads became customers. A report written only from platform data misses the part that matters most.
When in the month should the report be prepared?
A few days after the month closes, so that standard reports in GA4 and the ad platforms have finished processing and late enquiries have been logged. Preparing it on the first morning of the new month often means working from incomplete figures.
Should the report include organic social media figures?
Include them only as results where you can see them, such as enquiries that came through Instagram messages or tagged bio links. Follower growth and likes can go in an appendix. If social is meant to build awareness, say so and judge it over a longer period.
What if a month shows almost no enquiries from any source?
Check tracking first, by sending a test enquiry and comparing with your inbox, because a broken form or tag is a common cause. If tracking works, look at seasonality, website changes and paused campaigns in the what-changed section before drawing conclusions about any one channel.
A clear one-page report depends on tracking that counts the right things and records where they came from. If your current reports cannot answer the basic questions above, our tracking and reporting setup can put the foundations in place. You can read how measurement supports SEO, ads and the other channels in digital marketing for small businesses.
