Written by RHILLANE Ayoub
TLDR: Our monthly client report had grown to 14 pages, and every month it triggered the same call: “what does this mean?” We cut it to one page built around the three numbers a business owner reads, and the “what does this mean” calls were replaced by questions we could answer in one line. The cut itself took one afternoon; the hard part was admitting that the other 13 pages existed for us, not for the client.
The call came on the third of the month, as it always did. A client, the owner of a small hotel group in Morocco, had opened the monthly report, scrolled to page six, and asked me the question I had learned to dread: “So is this good?”
The report was 14 pages long. Impressions, click-through rate, keyword positions by group, device split, bounce rate, a map of sessions by city, screenshots of the ad accounts. My team had assembled it with real care, and it answered every question except the one he was asking.
Why the Report Kept Growing
Every page in that deck had a history. A client had once asked about mobile traffic, so the device split went in. Another had asked which city his visitors came from, so the map stayed. Nobody ever asked for a page to be removed.
The honest reason it was 14 pages is that a long report looks like a lot of work, and an agency likes to be seen working. Harvard Business Review’s piece on visualizations that really work asks two questions before any chart is drawn: is the information conceptual or data-driven, and are you declaring something or exploring something? A client report is declarative, and a declaration needs one message, not fourteen pages of exploration. Nothing on page six helped a hotel owner decide whether to keep paying us.
The Three Numbers a Business Owner Reads
We asked five clients what they actually looked at. The answers were almost identical, and none mentioned a keyword position.
- How many enquiries came in this month, against last month. Calls, form fills, booking requests, whatever the business counts as a lead. One number, one comparison.
- What each enquiry cost. Total fee plus ad spend, divided by the enquiries. The owner already does this sum in his head.
- The one thing we changed, and what we expect from it. Two sentences. A new page went live, a campaign was paused, a bid was raised on Arabic queries. What we think it will do and when the owner should expect to see it.
Below those three, one short paragraph on anything that needs a decision from the client, and nothing else. Positions, impressions and the city map moved to a shared dashboard the client can open whenever he wants. Ahrefs has a sensible guide to SEO reporting that separates the metrics an agency tracks from the metrics a client needs, and that distinction is the whole redesign. The 13 pages we cut were accurate, and they were ours.
What Happened to the Calls
The “what does this mean” calls were replaced by a different kind of call: “I see enquiries are down, is it the season or is it us?” That is a question we can answer in one line.
Two other things changed. Writing the “one thing we changed” line every month forced my team to have changed one thing worth writing about, which keeps the work honest. And when a client is unhappy, the one-page report makes the conversation shorter and more honest, because there is no page six to hide behind.
If Your Report Is Longer Than a Page
Ask three of your clients what they look at first. Build the page around that. Keep everything else somewhere the client chooses to visit. The work the team does at a digital marketing agency like ours did not change when the report shrank. What changed is that the client could finally see it.
Author Bio:
RHILLANE Ayoub is the founder and CEO of Rhillane Marketing Digital, a digital marketing agency headquartered in Tangier with a presence in Dubai and California, working with businesses in Morocco, France, the Gulf and the United States. If you want to see what a one-page monthly report looks like for your own business, you can find the team at Rhillane Marketing Digital.