What goes in a monthly client report.

A monthly client report exists to answer the one question the client is asking: is this working, and what are you doing about it. Most reports answer a different one, which is what happened on each platform. They run one platform per page, because that is the order the data arrives in, and leave the reader to assemble the answer themselves.

Turn that around. Open on the answer, then show the evidence for it, then say what happens next. A reader who stops after the first page should still leave knowing whether the month went well.

In this order, and each one short.

• The headline

  Two or three sentences: what changed against last month and against plan, and the one thing worth acting on. Written last, read first.

• The outcome figures

  The few numbers the client judges the work on, such as revenue, qualified leads or cost per acquisition. Each one shown against a comparison, never on its own.

• The channel view

  Spend and results by channel, side by side, on one definition of each metric. This is where a reader sees where the money went and what it returned.

• What moved, and why

  The notable changes, each with a cause you can stand behind. Tracking problems belong here as well as performance, because a gap in the data looks exactly like a drop in results.

• Next month

  The decisions: budget moved, tests started, things stopped. A report without this part is a record rather than advice.

Anything without a comparison. A figure with nothing beside it cannot be read as good or bad, so it asks the reader to remember last month, which they will not. Every number needs the last period, the same period last year, or the plan next to it.

Also walls of platform metrics nobody acts on, screenshots of platform interfaces, and charts that repeat a table already on the page. Keep those in a dashboard the client can open if they want the detail. The report is the argument, and the dashboard is the evidence.

A template is not the layout. It is the set of definitions behind the layout: what counts as a conversion, which revenue figure is used, whether spend includes fees, which timezone a day runs in. If those move from month to month, the report changes even when the results do not.

When a definition has to change, say so in the report for the month it happens and leave a note on the trend. Clients forgive a changed definition that was announced. They stop trusting the whole report when they find one that was not.

For an agency, the template should be one report filtered to each client, not a copy per client. Copies drift: somebody fixes a formula in one and not in the others, and by the end of a quarter no two clients are being measured the same way.

Report templates arrive pre-wired to your own tables and are scoped to each client, so the same report runs for everybody on the roster without being rebuilt. The figures in them come from one modelled set of tables in your own data warehouse, which is what keeps the channel view on a single definition of each metric.

Alerts cover the 'what moved' part from the other side: a threshold, a change, or data that never arrived, flagged before the report is due rather than discovered while writing it.