What Good Paid Media Reporting Actually Looks Like (and Why Most Agencies Get It Wrong)

The Problem With Most Agency Reports

Most agency reports are designed to impress, not inform. They lead with metrics that look good (impressions, reach, clicks) and bury or omit metrics that reveal whether the work is actually delivering business results (revenue, CPA, ROAS trend, margin).

Impression volume is the agency's output metric, not your business outcome metric. A campaign that reaches 2 million people and sells nothing has failed. A campaign that reaches 50,000 people and generates £40,000 in revenue at a healthy margin has succeeded. Which one sounds better in a report full of large numbers?

The Metrics That Actually Matter

For e-commerce accounts, your weekly report should include:

Revenue metrics: Total attributed revenue, ROAS (and how it is calculated — always ask), revenue trend week-on-week and vs same period last year.

Efficiency metrics: Cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR). These should be tracked over time to identify trends, not just reported as point-in-time snapshots.

Creative metrics: Which creatives are running, each creative's CTR, CPA, and spend. This reveals whether the agency is actively managing creative or just leaving campaigns to run.

Budget metrics: How much was spent vs planned, and how that split across campaigns. Underspend and overspend are both problems that should be explained.

Anomalies and actions: What changed this week, why, and what is being done about it. A report with no "this happened, we did this in response" section is a report that is covering something up.

The Reporting Cadence We Use

Every client at Convertec receives:

Live dashboard (always on): Real-time spend, revenue, and ROAS data via our CRM. No waiting for Monday to know what happened over the weekend.

Weekly written report (every Monday): Prior week performance summary, creative health, anomaly explanations, and the three actions being taken this week.

Monthly strategy call (60 minutes): Review prior month's tests, results, and learnings. Set priorities for the next month. This is where we challenge our own assumptions and client assumptions alike.

Quarterly business review (90 minutes): Benchmarking against industry peers, budget reallocation recommendations, channel expansion opportunities.

The live dashboard eliminates the power asymmetry that makes client-agency relationships fraught. You should always know exactly what is happening with your money.