Marketing Agency Reporting
Replacing a week of monthly copy-and-paste reporting with dashboards that are already correct when the month closes
The first week of every month
Forty clients, six ad platforms, one spreadsheet template. Every month the account team spent the first week exporting, pasting, reconciling and formatting — and then a day answering questions about numbers that had been transcribed by hand.
- Roughly 240 hours a month across the team went into assembling reports.
- Two or three reports each month carried a transcription error serious enough to need a correction email.
- Because the work was so expensive, clients only ever saw the picture once a month.
The rebuild
We treated the report as a product rather than a document.
- One warehouse. Every platform’s daily spend and conversion data lands in a single store overnight, keyed consistently across sources.
- One model. Blended cost per acquisition, contribution and pacing are calculated once, centrally, so no two reports can disagree.
- One template. The client-facing dashboard reads from the model. The monthly PDF is a render of the same dashboard, not a separate build.
- Exceptions, not summaries. Pacing that drifts past its threshold raises a flag on the day it happens instead of appearing in a report three weeks later.
The agency stopped selling reports and started selling attention. The reports were never the value; they were the evidence.
The awkward part
Historical data did not reconcile. Two platforms had been reporting in different time zones for eighteen months, and one client’s naming convention had changed mid-year. We rebuilt twelve months of history rather than start clean, because a dashboard with no past is a dashboard nobody trusts.
Results
- Monthly reporting effort fell from about 240 hours to under 20
- Clients moved from a monthly PDF to a live dashboard, refreshed daily
- Two account managers moved off reporting entirely and onto strategy
What it cost
Five weeks, and a genuinely unglamorous fortnight of data cleaning in the middle of it. That fortnight is the part most projects skip, and the part that decides whether anyone believes the result.
