Many marketing reports are built to show effort. Twenty charts, three tabs, a long email on the first working day of the month. The people who should decide something with it, a managing director or a head of marketing, read the first screen and move on.
This article is for those readers. It describes a report that fits on one page, takes about an hour to prepare and supports a real decision: where to put next month's budget and attention. If you already suspect that your current dashboard misleads you, read why a marketing dashboard may be lying to you first. Here the question is what to include in a short monthly summary.
The principle: follow the path to a customer
A useful report follows the path a person takes from first contact to purchase. Each number answers one question along the way. If you cannot say which question a number answers, leave it out. Page views and follower counts are common examples of numbers that feel important but rarely lead to a decision.
The five numbers
1. Visits from the channels you pay for or work on
How many people came to your site from each channel you actively use: search, email, social media, paid advertising. Take it from your web analytics tool and keep to three or four channels. This number tells you whether the activity reaches anyone at all.
2. Enquiries
How many people asked for something: filled in a form, called, wrote an email, booked a meeting. Count real enquiries, not downloads of a free guide, unless the guide is part of your sales route. Where possible, note the channel each enquiry came from.
3. Qualified enquiries
How many of the enquiries are, by your own definition, worth a sales conversation. This needs a short agreement between marketing and sales on what "qualified" means, for example the right company size, a real need and a realistic time frame. This is the number that shows whether marketing brings the right people or just many people.
4. Cost per qualified enquiry
Total spend on marketing in the month, including external help and tools, divided by the number of qualified enquiries. Include the work of your own people if you can estimate it. Keep the calculation the same each month, even if it is not perfect. The trend matters more than the exact value.
5. Customers won from marketing enquiries
How many enquiries from the period or earlier periods turned into a signed order. Sales cycles are often longer than a month, so look at a rolling three-month total next to the monthly value. This number links marketing to revenue and keeps the other four honest.
Where to get the numbers
Write one line under each number saying where it comes from: the analytics tool and the exact report, the shared inbox, the CRM view, the accounting category. Without this, the report slowly changes meaning when a colleague takes over, and a rise in a number may only be a rise in a definition.
If the data live in two places that disagree, do not hide it. Put a short note on the page. A visible difference is useful information, and it is often the first sign that a process needs fixing. For a closer look at attributing results to channels, see why marketing attribution is often broken.
How to read the page
Put the current month, the previous month and the change next to each number. If you have a full year of history, add the same month of last year, because many businesses are seasonal.
Then read from top to bottom and look for the first number that moved in a way you did not expect:
- Visits fell but enquiries held steady. The remaining traffic is probably better; do not panic.
- Visits and enquiries rose but qualified enquiries did not. You are attracting the wrong audience or the definition is unclear.
- Qualified enquiries rose but customers did not. Look at what happens after the handover to sales, not at marketing.
- Cost per qualified enquiry rose. Find which channel changed before cutting anything.
One small movement is not a finding. Wait for a second month before you change the plan, unless the change is large.
A short example
Imagine a company with 30 employees selling services to other businesses. In one month, its page shows 1,800 visits, 24 enquiries, 9 qualified enquiries, a cost per qualified enquiry that is higher than the month before, and one new customer. The three-month total shows four customers.
Reading from the top, the head of marketing sees that enquiries are stable but qualified ones dropped. A look at the channel notes shows that a new paid campaign brought several enquiries from very small firms outside the target group. The decision on the bottom of the page is to narrow the audience of that campaign for one month and to review the numbers again.
The figures are invented for illustration. The point is the order of reading: from the first moved number to one specific decision.
The decision line
Add one line at the bottom of the page: "Next month we will..." with one action, one owner and one date. If you cannot write it, the report did not do its job and the numbers need another look. Keep a list of earlier decision lines. After a quarter you can see which of them changed a number.
What to avoid
- Adding a sixth, seventh and eighth number "because we have the data".
- Changing definitions without a note on the page.
- Reporting only the numbers that grew.
- Sending the page without a decision line.
- Spending more time preparing the report than acting on it.
What to do this week
Open your last marketing report and mark the numbers that led to a decision in the past three months. Keep those and see which of the five above you are missing. Agree with sales on the definition of a qualified enquiry, write down the source of each number, and prepare the first page by the end of the month. It will not be perfect, and it does not have to be.
Sources
- Our related articles linked above.
- The choice of five numbers, the reading order and the example are a general working approach, not a standard; adapt them to your own sales process. The figures in the example are invented for illustration.
