An agency partner told me my reporting was useless and he was right

I used to send clients these huge 20 page monthly reports full of every metric you could track. Backlinks, keyword rankings, social shares, bounce rates, the whole kitchen sink. One of my partners at a digital agency finally called me out and said nobody reads that stuff and it actually hurts our joint proposals. He told me to cut it down to three things: leads generated, cost per lead, and project milestones. I tried it on a shared client last quarter and the client actually started asking questions about the data instead of ignoring it. Now I send one page max and our partnership meetings move way faster because we talk about results not numbers. Has anyone else found a sweet spot for how much reporting is too much?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_riley1mo ago

Respectfully, you might be giving up too much information. Those big reports serve a purpose if the client cares about things like SEO progress or branding. The three metrics you settled on work great for a performance marketing campaign, but a client spending money on brand awareness needs to see things like impressions and engagement metrics. Otherwise they just think you're not doing anything. How do you handle clients who ask for specific data points you cut out?

julia_patel29d ago

Just here nodding along @the_riley while hoping nobody asks about the SEO metrics I quietly dropped.

evan_campbell27d ago

Has anyone tried just framing the dropped numbers as "bonus context" instead of cutting them entirely? I used to cut our engagement metrics too until a client asked specifically for them during a quarterly review. Now I keep a one-pager with the full data ready to share if they ask, but lead with the three strongest metrics for the actual presentation.