22 September 2026 · 4 min read · Oscar Markham
What a weekly marketing report should actually contain
Agency reporting is frequently designed to look like work rather than to inform a decision. A useful report fits on one page and answers one question: was last week better or worse, and what are we doing about it.
The four numbers
Everything else is supporting detail.
- Enquiries you could actually serve — not form fills, not clicks
- What each one cost
- How many became a quote, a booking or a job
- What you spent
The one sentence
What changed this week and why. Not a list of tasks — an explanation of the decision.
'Paused the Tuesday ad set, it was producing enquiries at three times the others' is a sentence. 'Ongoing optimisation of campaign performance' is not.
What does not belong
Impressions, reach, engagement rate, follower growth, click-through rate as a headline. All of them can rise while enquiries fall.
They have diagnostic uses — a collapsing click-through rate tells you creative is tiring — but they are not results and should not be presented as though they were.
The test
Read the report and try to answer: was last week better than the week before, and do I need to do anything?
If you cannot, the report failed regardless of how much work went into it.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.