Commercial

How we report, and what is in it

A report exists to answer one question: is this working. Most agency reports answer a different question, which is whether the agency has been busy. Here is what ours contains, what it deliberately leaves out, and how to get a real redacted one before you sign anything.

The three questions a report has to answer

What should a marketing report include? Three things, and very little else. What changed in the numbers that matter to your business. What we did that could plausibly have caused the change. What happens next, and what we need from you to do it.

Everything beyond that is padding. Impressions, reach, follower counts and keyword totals are inputs, not outcomes, and a report built on inputs is designed to look productive in a month where nothing actually happened. The tell is simple: if a number cannot change a decision, it is in the report to fill space.

What is in ours

• Leads, by source, with the records attached. Not a count you have to believe, the actual list, so you can check it against your own phone log and inbox.
• Search visibility: the queries you were found for, the ones you were not, and the movement since last month. The whole list, not the flattering slice of it.
• AI answer visibility where we are tracking it, with the raw model responses attached so you can read what was actually said.
• Work shipped: the pages, the changes and the fixes, each with a link to the live thing.
• What did not work, named. A page that underperformed, a test that failed, a hypothesis we have dropped and why.
• Next month, with the one or two things we need from you and the date we need them by.

What is deliberately not in it

No vanity chart. No metric with no decision attached. No colour coding that implies a judgement the underlying data does not support.

No ranking screenshot cropped to the one good keyword. If a term moved, it is in the list beside the ones that did not, because a report that only shows winners is a report you cannot use to decide anything.

And no figure we cannot source. Every number traces to an export you can run yourself, from an account you own, using credentials we never held. If we cannot point at where a number came from, it does not go in. That rule removes more content from a report than any other and it is the one that makes the rest of it worth reading.

The redacted example

We keep a real monthly report with the client identity and the commercial figures removed, and we will send it to you before you commit to anything. Ask for it at contact@ninetyfifthmktg.com. It is the same document the client received, in the same format, with the names and the revenue blacked out and nothing else changed.

It is not a public download. A redacted client document sitting on an open page is still a client document sitting on an open page, and sending it on request means we know where it went. That is the same reason you will not find a wall of client dashboards in our portfolio.

Cadence, and who writes it

Monthly, on a fixed date, whether the month was good or not. A report that only arrives after a good month is not a report, it is a press release with a chart on it.

It is written by the person doing the work, not by an account manager translating it upward. That makes it shorter, occasionally blunter, and accurate about what was actually attempted rather than what sounds strategic. If a month produced nothing worth reporting, the first line says so and the rest explains why.

Three of these should be enough to make a decision on. 90 day initial term, then month to month at the same price. The industry asks for 6 to 12 months.

What a report cannot do

It cannot turn a slow month into a good one, and it cannot prove causation. Marketing is not a closed system: your phone also rings because of a referral, a sign, a truck with your name on it, or a competitor closing down. We attribute what the data supports and we label the rest as unattributed rather than quietly folding it into our column.

That honesty has a cost. Our reports look less impressive than the ones that claim every lead. We would rather hand you a number you can defend to your accountant than one you have to take on faith.