What belongs in a marketing report (free template)

Most marketing reports are a screenshot of a dashboard with a number under each chart. Spend, clicks, impressions, ROAS — all true, all there, and nobody reads it twice. A report like that takes an afternoon to build and leads to no decision.

If you run marketing at a 20–100 person company, you probably rebuild that same report every month. You're not alone: marketing teams spend an average of 14.5 hours a week just collecting and managing data, before anyone reads a word of it. That's the part worth fixing — not by adding charts, but by deciding what actually belongs in the report.

A report should answer, not display

The test for any line in a report is simple: does it change what you do next week? If it doesn't, it's decoration.

Bad: "Here's how every channel performed." A grid of fourteen metrics across five platforms.

Better: "Spend is up 12%, ROAS held, and one campaign is quietly eating a third of the budget." Three facts, one of them actionable.

A dashboard shows you everything. A report tells you what matters. They're not the same document, and most people ship the first one because it's easier to assemble.

What belongs in the report — six parts

A useful monthly (or weekly) marketing report has six parts. Each one is a question, not a chart.

1. Spend, and whether it's on pace. Not just "we spent €18,400." Spend against plan: "€18,400 of a €20,000 budget, on pace, but Meta is running 20% hot." One sentence tells you whether to act before the month ends.

2. Return — what the spend bought. Revenue, leads, or whatever your conversion is, next to the spend that produced it. ROAS or CPA at the account level, then per channel. A number with no denominator ("we got 240 leads") is trivia until you put cost beside it.

3. The campaigns that moved the number. Not all of them — the two or three that mattered. The top performer and the worst offender. "Brand search drove half the conversions at a €9 CPA; the new PMax campaign spent €2,100 and returned four leads." That's the line someone acts on.

4. Channel split. Where the money went and what each channel returned — Google Ads, Meta, GA4, and Seznam Sklik if you run it. Keep it to spend, return, and trend per channel. This is the one section a dashboard genuinely does well, so keep it short.

5. What changed. Covered below — it's the part most reports skip.

6. What to do next. Three bullets, maximum. "Cut PMax budget 30%, shift it to brand search, check why Meta CPA jumped." A report that ends without next steps is a status update, not a report.

The part most reports leave out

Parts 1–4 describe the state of things. The two that actually drive a decision — what changed and what to do next — are the two most reports leave out, because they're the hardest to assemble by hand.

"What changed" means the anomalies. ROAS dropped 30% week over week — why? Usually it's specific and findable: the main campaign spent its budget by Wednesday and went dark through the weekend. A spreadsheet won't surface that on its own; you go digging, and digging is the work that eats the afternoon.

This is the difference between a report you read and a report you react to. A reactive report says "here's what happened." A proactive one says "here's what changed, here's why, here's what to do." The second one is worth keeping.

It's also where automation earns its place — not by changing your campaigns for you, but by watching the accounts and flagging the anomaly before you'd have noticed it. A tool like Lupli reads the accounts and writes parts 5 and 6 for you. It recommends; you decide what to do with the budget. (If you're still picking the tool that feeds the report, we wrote a separate, non-ranked comparison of Supermetrics and the alternatives.)

A free template you can copy

Here's the skeleton. Copy it into a doc or a slide, fill the brackets, delete anything that doesn't change a decision.

MARKETING REPORT — [Month / week]

1. SPEND
   [€ spent] of [€ budget] — [on pace / over / under]
   Flag: [any channel pacing hot or cold]

2. RETURN
   Account: [revenue or leads] at [ROAS / CPA]
   vs last period: [+/- %]

3. CAMPAIGNS THAT MATTERED
   Best:  [campaign] — [result] at [CPA/ROAS]
   Worst: [campaign] — [spend] for [weak result]

4. CHANNEL SPLIT
   Google Ads | Meta | GA4 | Sklik
   [spend / return / trend per channel]

5. WHAT CHANGED
   [biggest anomaly] — [likely cause]

6. NEXT ACTIONS
   - [action 1]
   - [action 2]
   - [action 3]

Six parts, one page. If your current report is longer than this and harder to act on, the length is the problem.

The takeaway

A good report isn't the one with the most charts — it's the one that ends in three decisions you can defend. Start your next report from the six parts above, and cut every line that doesn't change what you do next week.