# What a Monthly Marketing Report Should Tell You (and What Padding Looks Like) *Marketing · November 1, 2026 · 5 min read · by Avinoam Freedman, Dialed In Digital* If you pay someone every month to handle your website, your Google profile or your SEO, the monthly report is the only place you see what that money did. Most owners skim it, see a lot of green arrows, and move on. That's exactly what a padded report is built for. Here is what a useful one contains, and how to spot filler in under a minute. ## What should a monthly marketing report actually tell you? A useful report answers three questions: did more people find you, did more of them contact you, and what was done this month to cause that. Every number should connect to one of those. If a figure doesn't change a decision or explain a result, it's decoration. The whole thing should fit on one page, in plain English, with the reasons behind each action written next to it. For a local service business, "found" means people seeing you on Google Search and Maps. "Contacted" means calls, form submissions, direction requests and booking clicks. Those are the numbers that pay your bills. Everything else in a report should explain why those moved, or why they didn't. ## Which numbers matter most for a local business? The numbers closest to a phone call matter most. Calls, form submissions, direction requests and website clicks from your Google profile come first. Search impressions and clicks from Google Search Console come next. Review count and rating come third. Traffic totals and social stats are supporting detail, not the headline. A good report also tells you where each number comes from: Google Search Console, your Google Business Profile, Google Analytics. If you could log in and check a figure yourself, you can trust it more. If a number comes from a tool you've never heard of and can't open, ask what it measures. ## What does a padded report look like? Padding is anything that makes the report longer without telling you whether the business got more customers. The common forms: - **A list of tasks instead of results.** "Published two posts, updated meta tags, submitted the sitemap." Tasks belong in a report, but only next to what they were meant to change. - **Impressions with no clicks.** Being shown 10,000 times sounds impressive. If almost nobody clicked, that's a problem to fix, not a win. - **Rankings for words nobody searches.** Ranking first for a phrase with no search volume costs nothing and earns nothing. - **Traffic that includes your own visits.** If you and your staff open the site every day, raw visit counts are inflated. A careful report says whether internal visits are filtered out. - **Charts with no comparison.** A number on its own means little. It needs last month, or the same month last year, next to it. - **Pages of screenshots.** Twelve pages of tool exports usually means nobody did the reading for you. ## How do you know the work caused the results? You often can't be certain, and an honest report says so. Search results move for reasons outside anyone's control: the season, a competitor's changes, updates to Google itself. What you can ask for is a stated reason behind every action and a prediction you can check later. For example: "I rewrote the services page to answer the five questions customers ask most; I expect more clicks from searches about those services within six to eight weeks." Next month, the report checks that prediction. When predictions get checked, you learn which work pays off. When they don't, every good month gets credited to the agency and every bad month gets blamed on Google. ## What should you ask your agency? Ask three things. Can I see these numbers myself, in my own accounts? What did you predict last month, and did it happen? What are you changing next month, and why? An agency doing real work answers all three in a sentence each. One that can't is telling you something. It's also worth checking who owns the accounts the numbers come from. Your Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should be in your name, with the agency added as a manager. If you ever leave, the history stays with you. ## What does my monthly report include? Mine is one page, written in plain English. It shows what was published and changed that month, with links, and the reason for every action. It covers your Google profile's calls, clicks and direction requests, Search Console impressions and clicks, your review count and rating, and whether AI assistants name your business. Every number comes from your own accounts. The report comes with the [monthly SEO plans](/marketing), and the prices are on the [pricing page](/pricing). ## FAQ **How long should a monthly marketing report be?** One page is enough for most local businesses. If it needs more than two pages to say whether you got more calls and why, something is being padded or something is being hidden. **Is website traffic a good measure of marketing results?** Only partly. Traffic shows that people arrived, not that they became customers. A site can gain visitors and still lose calls if the pages don't convert, which is the problem covered in [Your Website Gets Traffic But Nobody Calls](/blog/traffic-but-no-calls). **How long before SEO work shows up in the numbers?** Small fixes to a Google profile can show within weeks. Changes to rankings usually take a few months. A good report sets that expectation up front instead of celebrating or apologizing for every weekly swing. **Should I get access to the raw data?** Yes. Ask to be an owner of your Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics accounts. A report is a summary. You should always be able to check the source. --- *Want a second opinion on the report you get now? [Send it to me](/contact) and I'll tell you what it shows and what it leaves out.* Dialed In Digital · Websites that get found, and dialed in for growth. avi@dialedindigital.us · (954) 637-3694 · https://dialedindigital.us/