Key Takeaways
- A monthly report owes you three numbers: how many people contacted the business, how many became booked jobs, and how much money cleared. Everything else is supporting detail.
- Every one of those three needs a source attached. A total with no source cannot be acted on, and it cannot settle an argument between two vendors.
- Impressions, reach, domain authority and standalone rankings are noise for the owner paying the invoice. They move in months where your phone does not.
- A thirty page deck usually covers a thin result. Length and confidence run in opposite directions.
- You can hand your current vendor a one-page template this week. Their reaction to it tells you more than twelve months of reports will.
The Three Numbers
Most owners open the monthly report, scroll to the end, find no answer, and close it. Twenty-four pages. A chart of impressions. A paragraph about domain authority. Nothing that speaks to the question they had when they opened the file: did any of this make me money?
That report is doing a job. Informing you is not the job.
Here are the three numbers a report owes you every month.
The phone rang. How many people contacted the business. Calls, forms, texts, chats, walk-ins. One total, then a split by where each came from.
Jobs won. How many of those contacts turned into booked, paid work. Not qualified leads. Not opportunities. Not pipeline. Work you did and invoiced.
Money cleared. Revenue collected from those jobs inside the period, in dollars.
Three lines. Anything underneath them exists to support one of the three, or it comes out of the report. You already run on those numbers. You know roughly how busy the phone was and how the month closed. The report should confirm it, correct it, and tell you which channel caused it.
Signal vs Noise
Noise is not the same as lying. Most metrics in a weak report are real measurements. They simply cannot move your revenue on their own, and they move happily while your revenue sits flat, which makes them useless for a decision.
| Line in the report | What it proves | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions and reach | A page loaded somewhere | Noise |
| Keyword rankings | Position on one query on one day | Noise alone |
| Website sessions | Volume, with no intent or outcome | Weak |
| Calls, by source | Who wanted to buy, and from where | Signal |
| Booked jobs, by source | Which channel produced paid work | Signal |
| Revenue collected, by source | What the channel returned | Signal |
| Cost per booked job | Whether the spend works | Signal |
Rankings deserve one note. Position tracking is real work and it matters enormously to the person doing the SEO. As a monthly line for the owner paying the invoice, a screenshot of position four for a phrase nobody types is a picture of effort. Ask for the calls that came from search. Ranking is the mechanism. Calls are the outcome. If your vendor has started calling their work AEO, the same rule applies, and we wrote a checklist for that in five things to check before you believe them.
A Source on Every Line
A lead total with no source is a number you cannot act on.
Forty-one calls last month sounds healthy until you ask which of them came from the vendor billing you every month. When nobody can answer, you are paying on faith, and faith is how owners end up with three vendors all claiming the same phone call.
The fix is boring and takes an afternoon.
Give each channel its own tracked phone number. Google Business Profile gets one, the website gets one, ads get one, print gets one. Add a required field to your booking form or CRM asking how the caller heard about you. Free text is fine. Then log every lead on a single sheet: date, name, phone, source, booked yes or no, ticket value.
That sheet is the report. Whatever a vendor sends should reconcile against it. Running two agencies makes the split matter more, and there is a longer walkthrough in how to tell which agency a lead came from.
The One-Page Template
Copy this into an email and send it to whoever you pay. Ask for it starting next month. You are not asking them to build anything new. You are asking them to report what they should already track.
MONTH: ______
LEADS: ___ total
Google Business Profile: ___
Organic and AI search: ___
Paid ads: ___
Referral and repeat: ___
Unknown: ___
BOOKED JOBS: ___ total, same source split
REVENUE COLLECTED: $______, same source split
SPEND THIS MONTH: $______
COST PER BOOKED JOB: $______
THREE THINGS WE CHANGED:
THREE THINGS WE WILL CHANGE NEXT:
ATTACHED: lead log (date, name, phone, source, outcome)
An unknown row is allowed. Every business has one. What matters is that it shrinks month over month rather than swallowing the report.
Keep, Clock, or Replace
Send the template. What comes back sorts your vendor into one of three groups.
Keep paying if
They send the one-pager within a fortnight, the source rows are populated, and the unknown bucket is under a quarter of leads. A vendor who already tracks this has nothing to hide and will often thank you for the format, because it lets them argue for a bigger budget with evidence rather than adjectives.
Put them on a 60-day clock if
They agree in principle and then send the old deck with three numbers stapled to the front, or they say the tracking needs setting up first. Setting up tracking is a fair answer once. Give them 60 days in writing, offer CRM access, and pay for the call tracking yourself if that removes the excuse. Our piece on what should be visible by day 30 sets the milestones.
Start replacing them if
They explain why leads cannot be traced, argue the format oversimplifies their work, or go quiet. Those three answers all say the same thing: the numbers exist and you would not enjoy them. Three sharper questions to ask before you decide sit in is your SEO agency doing anything, and if this is your third or fourth agency, set the next one up so you can fire it with evidence.
What to Do Monday
Open last month's report. Time how long it takes to find how many jobs you booked from that vendor's work. If you cannot find it in sixty seconds, the report has failed at its only job.
Then send the template with a date on it. You are the client. Asking for leads, jobs and revenue by source is the lowest bar in marketing, and any vendor worth the retainer clears it without a meeting.
Want us to read the report with you?
Bring last month's report to a call. We will tell you which lines are real, which are decoration, and what your current vendor should be able to produce by next month.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a monthly marketing report from a local agency include?
Three numbers on page one. How many people contacted the business, how many of those became booked and paid jobs, and how much revenue landed in the period. Each of the three needs a source column so you can see which channel produced what. Under that, a lead log: date, name, phone, source, outcome. That's the whole report. Charts of impressions, ranking screenshots and traffic graphs are supporting detail at best. If your vendor sends thirty pages and none of them answer how many jobs you booked from their work, the report was built to look busy rather than to be read.
Which marketing metrics are noise for a local business owner?
Impressions, reach, follower growth, domain authority, bounce rate, average session duration, and keyword position on its own. Every one of those can improve in a month where your phone barely rang. They measure activity inside the marketing, not results outside it. Traffic sits in the middle. Sessions matter when broken down by source and paired with what those visitors did, and mean nothing as a standalone line. The test is simple: if a metric can double while your booked jobs stay flat, it does not belong on page one. Move it to an appendix for the person doing the work.
Should I pay extra for reporting, and what does it cost?
Reporting belongs inside the retainer. Whatever the retainer costs, the report is part of the deliverable, not a line item on top. If a vendor quotes reporting as a separate monthly fee, you are paying twice for work they have to do anyway to manage your account. Call tracking is the one honest add-on. A single-location setup with three or four tracked numbers costs $30 to $80 a month from most providers, and plenty of agencies fold that into the retainer. A dashboard login is not a product.
My agency sends a 30-page report every month. Is that a red flag?
Usually, yes. Length and confidence run in opposite directions. A vendor with a strong month says it in five lines: forty-one leads, nineteen booked, $46,000 collected, here is the log, here is what we changed. A vendor with a thin month fills the gap with volume, because thirty pages of charts feel like thirty pages of work. Page count alone is not the tell. Look at whether the outcome numbers appear early or get buried on page 22 under a slide about crawl depth. Ask for the same report as one page. A good vendor sends it that week.
How do I tell which vendor a lead came from when I run two agencies?
Separate tracked phone numbers, one per vendor, plus a source field on the form. Give each agency its own number to publish on the assets it controls. The SEO vendor's number goes on the website and Google Business Profile. The ads vendor's number goes in the creative and on the landing pages it built. Any call resolves to exactly one owner. For forms, capture the landing page URL and UTM parameters with the submission so the source travels into your CRM. Then reconcile monthly. When the two claimed totals exceed what your phone system recorded, somebody is counting the same call twice.
What if my agency says leads cannot be attributed to a source?
That answer was true in 2005. Attribution is imperfect now, and imperfect sits a long way from impossible. Between tracked numbers, form source fields, UTM tags and one question at booking, a single-location business can source 80 to 90 percent of its leads without much effort. The rest sits in an unknown bucket and stays there, which is fine while the bucket is small and visible. What should worry you is a vendor who prefers that bucket large. Vague attribution protects the vendor, never the owner. Offer to set the tracking up yourself and give them access. Watch how they react.
How long before a new vendor should show real numbers?
Tracking on day one, leads by day 30, booked jobs by day 60, cost per booked job by day 90. Setup is no reason to delay reporting. Call tracking, form source capture and the lead log take an afternoon, and a vendor who cannot produce a lead count in month one has not built the plumbing. Volume takes longer. Organic and AI search results build over three to six months, so month-one numbers are a baseline rather than a verdict. What you want in month one is the shape of the report you will read in month twelve. Empty rows are honest.
What do I do if my vendor refuses to change the report format?
Put the request in writing with a date. Send the one-page template, ask for it starting next month, and say plainly that you need leads, booked jobs and revenue by source. Then read the reply rather than the report. A vendor who says yes and asks for CRM access is fine. A vendor who points at a dashboard you already have is stalling, because compiling three numbers takes ten minutes. A vendor who explains that their work influences results too indirectly to attribute has told you what the next twelve months look like. Give it 60 days, then act.
About the author
Matthew Johnson is the founder of Pleiades Consultancy. He previously scaled his own marketing agency to multiple six figures before serving as CMO of an Amazon agency, where the client base tripled from 15 to 45 active clients during his tenure. He worked with some of the largest names in e-commerce, including Ridge Wallet, HexClad, BK Beauty, The Woobles, Walkize, Lonely Planet, and Obvi. He now works with local businesses to maximize their client acquisition and visibility through AI search with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot.