If a Report Cannot Change a Decision, Delete It
Why monthly reports stop being read
The monthly report is the most reliably produced and least reliably read document in marketing. It takes a day to assemble, it is circulated to people whose time costs more than that, and in most organisations nobody can name a decision it changed. That is not a failure of effort; it is a failure of purpose.
Length is part of the mechanism. Because a platform exports forty metrics, a report tends to carry forty metrics, and volume hides the two that matter while making the document hard to challenge. A report nobody can finish reading is a report nobody can argue with, which is quietly why the format survives.
A short standard for marketing reporting that survives contact with a board.
The test
For each number on the page, ask what decision would change if it moved. If nothing would, the number is decoration.
Applying that honestly usually removes half of a standard dashboard.
What stays
Revenue or qualified enquiries by channel. Cost against those outcomes. The leading indicators you have agreed in advance. A plain statement of what is not working.
Commentary matters more than charts. The chart shows what happened. The sentence explains why, and what you intend to do.
Cadence
Monthly for direction, quarterly for strategy, weekly only for things you can genuinely act on weekly.
The test every report should pass
Take last month’s report and ask what decision it changed. On most monthly reports the honest answer is none: it showed six metrics, four were up, two were down, and everyone agreed to keep going. That is a ritual rather than a tool, and it costs a day to produce and an hour of several salaries to read.
A report that earns its place opens with the decision it is asking for. Stop this, start that, move the budget here, or nothing has changed and here is the one number that proves it. Everything underneath exists to support that recommendation, and anything that does not support it is an appendix rather than a page.
What to keep
- One line at the top saying what you recommend and why.
- The two or three numbers that recommendation rests on, with last period and last year beside them.
- What changed since the previous report, in one short list.
- What you are doing next, with dates.
- An appendix for everything anybody might ask about, which nobody is expected to read.
Reporting every metric you can access
Because a platform exports forty metrics, a report tends to carry forty metrics, and the effect is to hide the two that matter. Volume also makes the report harder to challenge, which is part of why it persists: nobody can argue with a document they cannot finish reading.
Common questions
How long should a monthly report be?
One page for the decision, as many appendix pages as the data needs. If the first page needs two, the recommendation is not clear enough yet.
Should the report include modelled numbers?
Yes, labelled as modelled. The failure is presenting an estimate as a count.
What if the honest recommendation is to do nothing?
Then say so, with the number that supports it. A report that recommends patience is more credible than one that invents activity.
Who should the report be written for?
The person who can act on the recommendation. A report written for everybody is written for nobody.
