How to tell an agency is working for results: which reports to ask for

An advertising report can be made to look like a success whatever the results. All it takes is well-chosen charts and well-chosen periods.

Here is how to tell a report that contains information from a report that contains decoration.

What should be in the report

Spend. How much money went into advertising over the period. This is the basis.

Leads. How many enquiries came in. Ideally broken down by channel and campaign.

Cost per lead. Spend divided by leads. Watch the trend, not a single number.

Sales and revenue. How many leads turned into payment and for what amount. If the agency does not see sales, then analytics is not connected or there is no access to the CRM. This can be fixed, but raise it straight away.

What was done and what is planned. Not “optimised the campaigns”, but “switched off three ad groups with a cost per lead above the norm, added negative keywords, launching two new creatives”.

What should not be the main thing

Reach, impressions, clicks, likes. These are intermediate numbers. They help the specialist, but you do not need them to know whether advertising pays off.

Warning signs

• The report has only percentages, no absolute numbers (“clicks up 120%”, when clicks went from five to eleven).
• The comparison is with a convenient period where the result was worse than usual.
• There are no sales numbers, and this is explained by “the complexity of attribution”.
• The report arrives once a quarter.
• Any question turns into a talk about how advertising “works in the long run”.

What to do

Decide which five numbers you want to see every week, and ask for them in the same format every time. Format matters more than looks: that way you notice at once if something goes wrong.

Our take

An agency that loves talking about reach is usually unsure about sales. An agency that shows the cost per lead and revenue straight away, as a rule, is not afraid of you doing the maths.

Send us your latest report, and we will go through what is in it and what is missing.

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