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Measure it and report

Five resources for knowing where you actually stand, then showing it. The audit and checklist tell you what is true; the report and dashboard tell everyone else. The glossary is there for the moment someone asks what a metric in your report actually means.

Which one do you need?

If you need to… Use You get
Find out how good a setup actually is, with a score Audit & scorer 45 scored items on the page + Excel and PDF
Check the fundamentals are in place at all Fundamentals checklist Tickable checklist + printable PDF
Send a client or manager a monthly report Client report Excel with working formulas + sample PDF
Track a trend rather than explain a single month KPI dashboard Excel dashboard, 12 months of rows
Work out what a metric in a report actually means Metrics glossary Definitions, formulas and confused pairs

6 resources All free, no signup

Audit first, report second

Reporting on a setup you have not audited produces confident numbers about the wrong things. The sequence that avoids that:

  1. Run the checklist if you are not sure the basics exist — conversion tracking that fires once, one canonical hostname, a form somebody actually receives.
  2. Run the scored audit to find out which areas are weak and by how much. It weights eight sections, so it ranks by points lost rather than raw percentage — a weak heavily-weighted area costs you more than a weaker trivial one.
  3. Fix the measurement before reporting on it. This is the step that gets skipped, and it invalidates everything downstream.
  4. Then report monthly, and keep a 12-month dashboard alongside it so a single bad month is visible as a wobble rather than a crisis.

What to report, channel by channel

The most common reporting mistake is sending the same six metrics for every channel. Each one answers a different question, and each has a specific number that gets quoted when it should not be.

Channel The number that matters Useful supporting metrics The metric to stop reporting
Organic search Non-paid conversions, and enquiries from them Impressions and average position by query group; pages earning their first clicks Keyword rankings for single terms. Position varies by person and place
Paid search Cost per qualified enquiry Search-term waste, impression share lost to budget, conversion rate by campaign Click-through rate on its own. A high CTR on the wrong query is a faster way to waste money
Paid social Cost per outcome, measured against your own records Creative-level cost per result, frequency, landing page conversion rate Platform-reported ROAS. Several platforms will each claim the same sale
Email Revenue or enquiries per send Click-to-open, list growth net of unsubscribes, deliverability and bounce rate Open rate. Privacy features inflate it, and it has not been trustworthy for years
Organic social Referred sessions that convert Saves and shares, follower growth, comments worth replying to Impressions and reach. They rise with posting volume regardless of effect
Content Conversions from the pages you planned Non-paid entrances per page, pages past their refresh date, links earned Time on page. It rises when people cannot find what they came for
Whole account One primary metric the business already cares about Blended cost per outcome, blended ROAS, pipeline or revenue Sessions as a headline. Traffic is an input, not a result

Two of those are worth stating plainly because they cause arguments. Open rate stopped being a measurement when mail clients began pre-fetching images. And platform ROAS is not blended ROAS — if you add up what each platform claims, the total will exceed what the business actually took, which is the single most common reason a report and a bank statement disagree.

How often, and for whom

Cadence Audience What it should contain
Weekly Whoever is doing the work Spend against plan, anything broken, one decision needed. Five minutes to read
Monthly The client or the manager Primary metric, four supporting numbers, commentary, next actions. One page
Quarterly Whoever owns the budget Trend over months, what was dropped and why, reallocation proposal
Always available Anyone curious between reports The dashboard. It exists so the monthly report can stay short

A monthly report that takes a day to produce will be late, and a late report gets read after the decision it was meant to inform. If yours takes more than about two hours, the fix is fewer metrics or a dashboard doing the collection — not a bigger effort.

The number of metrics is the problem

Almost every report I have been shown has too many numbers and no verdict. A report with forty metrics and no sentence saying whether the month was good is harder to act on than one with four metrics and a recommendation — and it takes longer to produce, so it gets produced late.

Pick one primary metric. If two are primary, neither is, and nobody is accountable when they conflict. Everything else in a report is context for that one number.