Reporting
How to Write Report Commentary a Client Actually Reads
The three-part test every commentary line should pass, five weak lines rewritten, and the order to write a monthly marketing report in.
The numbers in a marketing report are the easy part — a spreadsheet can produce them. What decides whether the report gets read is the commentary, and most commentary fails the same way: it restates the number in words. “Sessions were down 12% month on month” tells the reader something they can already see in the row directly above it.
A commentary line has to do three things: say what changed, give the reason, and say whether the change was intentional. That is the whole test, and almost nothing passes it on the first draft.
The three-part test
| Part | The question it answers | What it looks like when missing |
|---|---|---|
| What changed | Which metric, by how much, against what | “Performance was mixed this month” |
| Why | The cause, named specifically | “Due to a number of factors” |
| Was it intentional | Did we do this, or did it happen to us | The reader cannot tell whether to be pleased or worried |
The third part is the one that gets left out, and it is the one the reader most wants. A 12% drop you caused by pausing an unprofitable campaign and a 12% drop you did not notice for three weeks are the same number and completely different news.
Five lines, rewritten
1. The restatement
Organic sessions decreased by 12% compared to last month.
Organic sessions fell 12%, entirely from the two guide pages we deindexed on the 8th while they are rewritten. Sessions to the money pages were flat. This was planned and reverses in September.
2. The vague cause
Conversion rate dropped due to various factors including seasonality and market conditions.
Conversion rate fell from 3.1% to 2.4%. Two thirds of that is the checkout error on mobile Safari that ran from the 3rd to the 11th — fixed, and conversion recovered to 3.0% for the rest of the month. The remaining third is the usual August pattern in this account.
3. The good news with nothing behind it
Great month for paid search, with a strong increase in ROAS.
Paid search ROAS went from 3.2× to 4.1×. This is not more efficient buying — we cut the two worst ad groups, so spend fell 30% and revenue only fell 11%. Volume is down and profit is up. If the priority is growth rather than efficiency, we should put that budget back somewhere else.
4. The number with no consequence
Email open rate was 41%, up from 38%.
Email revenue was $2,880 from four sends, up 9%. Open rate is not in this report because image pre-fetching counts loads rather than readers; the deliverability numbers that matter — a 0.4% bounce rate and no complaints — are in the appendix.
5. The one that hides a problem
Total leads were on target at 52.
Total leads hit 52 against a target of 50, but only 19 met the qualification criteria against a target of 20. Raw volume came from a broad-match term that converts well on the form and badly in the sales conversation. I would rather miss the raw number next month and hit the qualified one.
Notice what the rewrites have in common: each one names a specific cause, quantifies it, and tells the reader whether to act. None of them is longer than four sentences.
Rewrite 3 is also the case for not reporting a ratio on its own. Spend fell 30% and revenue fell 11%, so the ratio improved while the business took less money — and ROAS still says nothing about whether the month was profitable until the gross margin is beside it.
Write it in this order
Not top to bottom. The order that produces a useful report is:
- Answer the primary question first. Did the thing we are paid to move, move? One sentence. If nobody agreed which number that was, no commentary fixes it — that decision comes before the reporting period.
- Explain the largest variance next, whichever direction it went. If one line moved 40% and five moved 3%, the five are not worth a sentence.
- Separate what you did from what happened to you. Two different lists. Readers forgive the second and hire you for the first.
- State the next action, with an owner and a date. “Rewrite the two guide pages by the 12th” is a next action. “Continue to monitor” is not.
- Then fill in the numbers, which are already calculated.
The report template puts the commentary and next-action blocks directly beneath the channel table in the same tab, rather than in a separate document, because that is the part people skip when they are in a hurry.
Three rules for the language
Name the cause or say you do not know it yet. “We have not identified the cause; here is what we are checking and by when” is a perfectly professional sentence, and it is far better than a vague one. It also means something when you do name a cause.
Quantify the attribution. “Partly due to the outage” is unhelpful; “two thirds of the fall is the outage” tells the reader how much of the problem is now solved.
Say what you would do, not what could be done. A list of options is a decision handed back to someone who is paying you not to make it. Give the recommendation, then the alternatives.
Do not report on measurement you have not checked
A confident explanation of a change that was actually a tracking error is the fastest way to lose credibility, and it happens most often after an analytics change nobody mentioned. Run the digital marketing audit before the first report on a new account — reporting on broken measurement just formats the wrong numbers accurately.
How long it should be
One page of commentary for a monthly report, and it should shrink over time rather than grow.
The pressure runs the other way: every question a client asks tends to add a permanent row, and nothing is ever removed. Resist it by agreeing at the start what is a headline and what is an appendix. A report that grows every month is a report that ends up being skimmed for the total at the bottom.
For a channel-specific report
The same three-part test applies, but the causes are more technical and the reader is usually less willing to take them on faith. The SEO report template includes a completed example so you can see the level of commentary that makes a technical report readable by someone who does not do SEO.
Whichever format you use, apply the test line by line. If a sentence does not say what changed, why, and whether you meant it, delete it — the table above it already said the number.