A marketing report should help someone make a decision. That’s pretty much it.
Plenty of reports are just a pile of charts. They show lots of activity and say nothing about whether the business is getting closer to its goals. So start with the question the report needs to answer, then pick the numbers that can reasonably help answer it.
Connect the measures to the goal
If the aim is more good enquiries, report on how many came in and something about their quality too. If you’re trying to get people using a product, look past first visits to whether they actually did something useful. How many people saw you, how many engaged and what the business got out of it are different stages. Try not to blur them together.
Agree on definitions before you compare anything. What counts as an enquiry? Are test submissions filtered out? What happens when the same person gets in touch twice? When definitions drift from month to month, you end up with “changes” that have nothing to do with customers.
Compare periods fairly
Compare like with like, and put the dates on everything. Note anything that might have affected the numbers, whether that’s a campaign starting or stopping, a tracking change, a new offer or stock running out. A month with a big sale isn’t really comparable to a month without one, even if both have 30 days.
Always show the actual numbers next to the percentages. Going from 4 enquiries to 8 is a “100% increase”, which sounds great until you realise it’s four extra emails. If you started from zero, just give the counts, because a percentage there means nothing.
Separate observations from explanations
Say what the data shows first. Then suggest why.
More visits but fewer enquiries could mean a few different things. Maybe a different kind of visitor turned up. Maybe the form broke. The report on its own often can’t tell you which, and it’s OK to admit that.
Write down what’s missing, too. If a tool shows no data, that doesn’t prove nothing happened. Check what the tool actually tracks and whether it was set up and working during that period.
End with a specific decision
For each important finding, name an action, a person and a date to review it. That might mean rewriting a landing page, testing the enquiry form or asking the sales team what they’re hearing. Keep the size of the action in line with how strong the evidence is.
Sometimes the honest conclusion is “let’s watch this for another month”, and that’s a perfectly valid decision. Just don’t change five unrelated things at once when you’re trying to understand one problem, or you’ll never know what made the difference. Get the definitions straight, compare fairly and write down what you decided. Do that and the monthly report turns into something the team actually uses.