Running ads
What should I expect an agency to report every month?
The short answer
Four things, at minimum: what the month cost, what it produced in real inquiries, the search terms report showing what you actually paid for, and a dated list of what your agency changed. A report showing only impressions and clicks describes activity rather than results.
Most monthly reports are a screenshot of a dashboard with a paragraph underneath. They are not dishonest. They are just answering a question nobody asked, which is what the platform did, rather than the one you have, which is whether this is working.
A useful report is short and contains four things. Everything else is optional.
What you spent. What it produced in real inquiries. What you actually paid for, which is the search terms. And what changed in the account, with dates.
If those four are present you can have a real conversation. If they are missing, no amount of chart decoration substitutes.
The four things, and why each one earns its place
Each of these answers a question the others cannot, which is why the set is short and why dropping one hurts.
Spend, split by where it went. One total tells you nothing. Spend by campaign, and ideally by the handful of keywords taking most of it, is the number that lets you ask whether the distribution makes sense.
Real inquiries, not conversions as a word. A conversion is whatever somebody configured it to be. Microsoft defines one plainly as the completion of an action by a customer after viewing your ad, which could be a purchase, a registration, or whatever you consider your goal. That definition is deliberately broad, which is why "42 conversions" means nothing until somebody says what the 42 were. Ask for the count of each action separately.
The search terms report. Google describes it as a way to see how your ads performed when triggered by actual searches, and it draws the distinction the whole report rests on: a search term is what a person entered, while a keyword is what an advertiser added to an ad group. This is the only part of a report written in words you already understand, and it is the part most often left out.
A dated change log. What was added, paused, rewritten or adjusted, and when. Without it you cannot connect a movement in the numbers to anything, and neither can the person who made the changes.
A change log does not need to be elaborate. Three columns are enough: the date, what changed, and why. Paused seven keywords with no inquiries in 90 days. Rewrote the headline on the roofing ad group. Raised the budget on the emergency campaign after a storm. Anybody reading that six months later can reconstruct what happened, which is exactly what you need when a number moves and nobody remembers why.
It has a second use that matters more over time. A log makes it visible when nothing was done. Three months of empty rows is itself a finding, and it is one no chart will ever show you.
What a report should not be
A few common contents are decoration, and recognizing them saves everyone time.
Impressions as a headline. Impressions are the denominator under other numbers, not an achievement. A month with more impressions and fewer inquiries is a worse month.
Position or rank screenshots from a tool. Google says directly that it does not evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and that those tools do not have access to Google's internal ranking data. So a rank chart is one company's estimate of another company's results.
Anything phrased as a guarantee. Google's own advice on hiring is blunt: "If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else." A report that promises positions is describing something nobody can sell.
Averages with nothing underneath. An average cost per click across a whole account hides the one term eating the budget. The average is the summary, not the finding.
If the work includes SEO rather than only ads, the same four questions apply with different nouns. What was published or changed, with dates. What those pages did in impressions and clicks, from Search Console rather than a third-party estimate. Which searches brought people in. And what is planned next.
The reason to insist on Search Console specifically is that it is the only source reporting what Google actually recorded for your site. Everything else is a model of it. Google says outright that it does not evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and that they do not have access to its internal ranking data, so a tool's number and Google's number are answering different questions.
Beware one substitution in particular. A report full of tasks completed is not a report of results. Twelve blog posts published is an activity count. The question is what those pages did once they existed, and that answer lives in Search Console.
Worked example of a report that actually says something
Numbers make this concrete. Treat them as an illustration rather than a benchmark.
Spend 4,000 dollars. 500 clicks, so an average cost per click of 8 dollars. 40 conversions, which sounds excellent until the split shows 12 phone calls over 30 seconds, 9 quote forms, and 19 newsletter signups.
So the real inquiry count is 21, not 40, and the cost per inquiry is about 190 dollars rather than the 100 dollars the headline implied. If a won job is worth 2,400 dollars and one in four inquiries converts, each job costs about 760 dollars in advertising to win. That is now a business decision rather than a marketing report.
Notice what made it useful. Not a new chart. The split, and one line of arithmetic.
What to ask for, in one message
You do not need to learn the platforms. These six requests are enough, and any competent provider can answer them without preparation.
- Show spend by campaign, and the ten keywords that took the most budget.
- Break the conversion number into the separate actions it is made of.
- Send the search terms report for the month, sorted by cost.
- List what changed in the account this month, with dates.
- Tell me the cost per real inquiry, not per conversion.
- Tell me one thing you are changing next month and what you expect it to do.
That last one matters more than it looks. A report that never proposes anything is a record, not a service.
On cadence, monthly is right for the document and wrong for the attention. Accounts do not wait for month end, and the most expensive problems, a budget consumed in a week or a keyword suddenly matching something absurd, are cheap to fix on day three and costly to discover on day thirty. Monthly is the reporting rhythm. It should not be the checking rhythm.
On access, which is worth settling early
Google makes a specific recommendation about audits that generalizes well. Its guidance says that if an SEO offers to do an audit, you should carefully consider what is involved and only grant read access to Search Console at that stage, not write access.
The principle holds beyond audits. Reporting requires read access. Changing things requires more, and the two should be separate decisions made deliberately rather than bundled at signup.
Monthly reporting on ad accounts is one of the things we do, so it is worth being plain that the four items above are a low bar, and any provider should be able to produce them for the month that just ended.
Terms used on this page
Sources
- About the search terms report (Google Ads Help)
- What is an SEO expert? (Google Search Central)
- Report Attributes and Performance Statistics (Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft Learn)
Last reviewed 2026-09-11.