The one-page dashboard that replaces your marketing report
If your monthly marketing report is more than one page, it is not a report — it is a document designed to look like work. Seven numbers decide everything.
The seven numbers
Weekly, by source. Not monthly, because monthly is too late to act on, and not blended, because blending hides which channel is carrying the others.
- Qualified inquiries. In your service area, in your scope, decision-maker. Not raw leads.
- Missed calls. Count and hour. The only number on this list you can fix tomorrow at no cost.
- Median time to first human contact. Median, not average.
- Appointments held. Held, not set. The gap between them is your no-show rate, and it is usually invisible.
- Jobs signed.
- Cost per job signed. Spend divided by jobs, per source.
- Average job value. Because a channel producing cheap small jobs can beat one producing expensive big ones, or lose to it, and cost per job alone cannot tell you.
What does not belong on it
Impressions and reach. Nobody has ever made a decision from an impression count. It is on reports because it is large and grows.
Clicks and click-through rate. Diagnostics for whoever runs the ads, not information for whoever runs the business.
Rankings for individual keywords. Results vary by person, place and device. A ranking screenshot is a photograph of one person's search.
Social followers. Unless you can trace a follower to a signed job, it is a vanity line.
None of these are useless. They are just not decisions, and putting them on the same page as decisions is how reports get long and stop being read.
The three-question weekly review
Fifteen minutes with the page in front of you.
- Which source has the lowest cost per job signed at acceptable job value? That is where the next dollar goes.
- Which single number moved most, and do we know why? If nobody knows, that is the week's investigation.
- What is the worst number, and is it a marketing problem or an operations one? Missed calls and no-shows are operations. Treating them as marketing is how firms buy more leads to fix a leak.
Why one page matters
A long report is a defensive document. Its length is the point: it demonstrates activity, and it makes it hard to notice that a key number went the wrong way.
One page with seven numbers cannot hide anything. That is uncomfortable for whoever produces it, which is exactly why you should insist on it — including from us.