Marketing Reporting for SMEs: What to Measure and How to Do It

Here’s a Monday morning I’ve witnessed too many times: a marketing manager arrives at the office, opens seven different platforms, spends three hours pulling numbers into a spreadsheet, emails it to the boss, and the boss glances at it for 30 seconds before asking “so, is it working?”

That’s not reporting. That’s a waste of everyone’s time.

Good marketing reporting should take minutes, not hours. It should answer the questions that actually matter. And it should drive better decisions, not just fill a PowerPoint slide.

I’ve built marketing reporting systems for businesses of all sizes, and the principles are always the same — whether you’re a solo founder tracking Google Ads or a marketing team reporting to a board. This guide covers what to measure, what to ignore, the tools that work, and how to automate the whole thing so you can spend your time on actual marketing.

Why Marketing Reporting Matters (More Than You Think)

Let me be direct: if you’re spending money on marketing and you’re not measuring the results properly, you’re gambling.

I know that’s uncomfortable. Plenty of business owners spend £1,000-£5,000 a month on marketing activities — Google Ads, social media management, SEO — and have only a vague sense of whether it’s working. They might know their revenue is growing, but they can’t connect specific marketing activities to specific results.

This matters for three reasons:

1. You Can’t Optimise What You Don’t Measure

Without reporting, you’re making decisions based on gut feeling. Sometimes gut feeling is right. Often it isn’t. I’ve seen businesses double their spend on channels that weren’t working and cut the ones that were — because they didn’t have the data to tell the difference.

2. You’re Probably Wasting Money

In my experience, most SMEs are wasting 20-40% of their marketing budget on activity that generates little or no return. Proper reporting identifies this waste immediately. That’s not a small number — on a £3,000/month budget, that’s £600-£1,200 being thrown away every month.

3. It Builds Confidence in Marketing Investment

When you can show a clear link between marketing spend and business results, it’s much easier to justify (and increase) the budget. “We spent £2,000 and generated £15,000 in revenue” is a conversation that wins every time.

The Metrics That Actually Matter

This is where most guides go wrong. They give you a list of 50 metrics to track. Nobody needs 50 metrics. You need about 5-8, depending on your business. Here’s how to choose the right ones.

Tier 1: Business Metrics (The Ones Your Boss Cares About)

These are the numbers that connect marketing directly to business outcomes. Every SME should track these:

• Revenue from marketing channels — How much revenue can you attribute to your marketing activities?
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) — How much does it cost to acquire a new customer?
• Return on ad spend (ROAS) — For every £1 you spend on advertising, how much revenue comes back?
• Marketing-sourced leads — How many leads are coming from each marketing channel?

Tier 2: Channel Metrics (How Your Marketing Is Performing)

These help you understand which channels are working and which need attention:

• Website conversion rate — What percentage of visitors take the desired action?
• Organic search traffic — Are your SEO efforts driving more visitors over time?
• Email open and click rates — Is your email content resonating?
• Cost per click (CPC) — Are you paying a fair price for paid traffic?

Tier 3: Diagnostic Metrics (For Troubleshooting)

Only look at these when something in Tier 1 or 2 looks wrong:

• Bounce rate — Are people leaving your site immediately?
• Time on page — Are they actually reading your content?
• Click-through rate (CTR) — Are your ads and emails compelling enough?
• Impression share — Are you losing out on visibility?

The Vanity Metrics Trap

Stop reporting on these unless they’re directly tied to a business outcome:

• Social media followers
• Page likes
• Impressions (on their own)
• “Brand awareness” (unless you’re measuring it properly)
• Website traffic (without conversion context)

I once had a client proudly tell me they’d grown their Instagram following from 500 to 5,000. When I asked how many sales came from Instagram, the answer was zero. Five thousand followers, zero revenue. That’s not a marketing win — it’s a hobby.

The rule: Every metric you report should answer one of these questions:

1. Is this making us money?
2. Is this going to make us money?
3. Are we wasting money?

If a metric doesn’t answer one of those, don’t put it in your report.

Building Your Marketing Report

Structure: Keep It Simple

The best marketing reports I’ve seen fit on a single page. Here’s the structure I recommend:

Section 1: Headline Numbers (30 seconds)

• Total leads this period
• Total revenue attributable to marketing
• Overall ROAS
• Comparison to previous period (week-on-week or month-on-month)

Section 2: Channel Breakdown (2 minutes)

• Performance by channel: SEO, PPC, social, email
• What’s up, what’s down, and why

Section 3: Insights and Actions (1 minute)

• 2-3 key observations
• Recommended actions for the next period

That’s it. No 20-page decks. No vanity metrics. Just the numbers that drive decisions.

Weekly vs Monthly: What Do You Need?

This is a common question, and the answer depends on your spend:

Weekly reporting works best when:

• You’re spending more than £1,000/month on paid advertising
• You’re running active campaigns that need optimisation
• Performance is volatile and needs close monitoring
• You’ve got someone who will actually act on the data weekly

Monthly reporting is fine when:

• Your marketing is predominantly organic (SEO, content, social)
• Spend is under £1,000/month
• Performance is relatively stable
• You’re a small team with limited time

My recommendation: Start with monthly, add weekly when your spend justifies it. There’s no point producing a weekly report nobody reads. A monthly report that gets 30 minutes of genuine attention is infinitely more valuable.

Tools for Marketing Reporting

You don’t need expensive tools to report effectively. Here’s what I recommend at different levels:

Free / Low Cost

• Google Analytics 4 — Essential for website data (free)
• Google Ads reporting — Built-in, decent for basic PPC reporting
• Google Sheets / Excel — Simple dashboards using data exports
• Facebook Ads Manager — Built-in reporting for Meta advertising

Mid-Range

• Looker Studio (Google Data Studio) — Free tool for building visual dashboards that pull from multiple sources
• Mailchimp / HubSpot — Email marketing platforms with built-in reporting
• SEMrush / Ahrefs — SEO tracking and competitor analysis (£80-£200/month)

For Serious Operations

• Custom dashboards — Built specifically for your data sources and KPIs
• Automated reporting pipelines — Data flows automatically, reports generate themselves
• AI-enhanced insights — Not just “what happened” but “what does this mean and what should we do?”

The Dashboard That Gets Used

I’ve written a complete guide to building a marketing dashboard that people actually use, but the key principle is this: a dashboard should answer your most important questions at a glance.

If someone needs to click through five tabs and cross-reference three data sources to understand performance, the dashboard has failed. Keep it to one screen, 5-8 key metrics, and a clear visual indicator of whether things are going up or down.

Presenting Marketing Results to Stakeholders

Whether you’re presenting to a business owner, a board, or yourself, how you communicate results matters as much as the data itself.

Know Your Audience

• Business owners want to know: Is marketing making money? Should we spend more or less?
• Finance directors want to know: What’s the ROI? How does it compare to forecast?
• Sales teams want to know: Are leads any good? Is lead volume going up?

Tailor your report to whoever’s reading it. A board-level summary should be completely different from an internal marketing team review.

Tell the Story

Numbers on their own are meaningless. “Website traffic was 12,450” means nothing. “Website traffic was up 23% month-on-month, driven by our new blog content strategy, and conversion rate held steady at 3.2%” — that tells a story.

Every report should answer three questions:

1. What happened? (The data)
2. Why did it happen? (The analysis)
3. What should we do about it? (The recommendation)

Be Honest About What’s Not Working

Nothing kills trust faster than a marketing report that only shares good news. If a campaign underperformed, say so. Explain why. Explain what you’re doing differently.

Business owners respect honesty far more than spin. If PPC cost per lead spiked this month because of a seasonal competitor surge, say that. If you tested a new landing page and it underperformed, share the learning.

Automating Your Marketing Reports

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of the time spent on marketing reporting is mechanical data collection, not analysis. Someone logs into Google Ads, downloads a CSV, copies numbers into a spreadsheet, formats it, does the same for Facebook, GA4, the CRM… and by the time the report is assembled, they’ve spent hours on data entry and minutes on insight.

This is exactly the kind of work that should be automated.

What Can Be Automated

• Data collection — Pulling metrics from all your platforms automatically
• Report formatting — Compiling data into consistent, branded templates
• Comparison calculations — Week-on-week, month-on-month, year-on-year changes
• Distribution — Reports delivered to the right people at the right time
• Basic insights — AI-generated commentary on significant changes

What Shouldn’t Be Automated

• Strategic interpretation — What the numbers mean for business decisions
• Action planning — What to do differently based on the data
• Stakeholder communication — The nuanced conversation around results

The Cost of Manual Reporting

Let’s do the maths. If your marketing person spends 4 hours per week assembling reports:

• 4 hours × 48 working weeks = 192 hours per year
• At an average salary cost of £30/hour, that’s £5,760 per year spent on data assembly
• That’s a skilled person doing copy-paste work instead of actual marketing

For context, automating this entirely costs a fraction of that — and frees up nearly 200 hours of marketing time per year.

I’ve written a complete guide to automated marketing reporting if you want the details on how to set this up.

The Reporting Cadence: What Goes When

Not every metric needs the same reporting frequency. Here’s a practical cadence that works for most SMEs:

Daily (Quick Glance — 2 Minutes)

Only if you’re spending more than £100/day on paid advertising:

• Ad spend vs. daily budget
• Any campaigns flagged (overspend, disapprovals, errors)
• Revenue from e-commerce (if applicable)

Tool: A simple dashboard you can check on your phone. Don’t make this complicated.

Weekly (Review — 15-30 Minutes)

• Total leads / conversions vs. previous week
• Channel-by-channel performance
• Cost per lead / ROAS
• Any significant anomalies
• Action items for the coming week

This is the report that drives decisions. If you only do one reporting frequency, make it weekly.

Monthly (Strategic Review — 1-2 Hours)

• All weekly metrics aggregated with month-on-month trends
• Channel performance over time (are trends improving or declining?)
• Budget review (are we on track for the quarter?)
• Content performance (which blog posts, emails, or campaigns performed best?)
• Competitor activity (anything noteworthy?)
• Strategic recommendations for next month

Quarterly (Planning — Half Day)

• Review against quarterly goals
• Set new goals for next quarter
• Budget reallocation based on performance data
• Review and update your marketing strategy
• Audit your reporting — are you measuring the right things?

Common Reporting Mistakes

1. Reporting Everything, Understanding Nothing

More data ≠ better decisions. I’ve seen 30-page monthly reports where the recipient reads the first page and bins the rest. Be ruthless about what makes the cut.

2. Comparing the Wrong Time Periods

Comparing December to November is misleading for most businesses. Use year-on-year comparisons for seasonal businesses. Use rolling averages to smooth out weekly volatility.

3. Ignoring Context

A 50% drop in traffic sounds terrible — unless it happened over Christmas when nobody’s searching for your product. Always add context to your numbers.

4. Reporting Without Recommendations

A report that says “here’s what happened” without “here’s what we should do” is only half a report. Every report should include clear next steps.

5. Not Reporting at All

The worst mistake. Some businesses avoid reporting because they’re afraid of what the data might show. That fear is costing you money every single day.

Getting Started: Your First Marketing Report

If you’re not currently doing any structured reporting, here’s how to start today:

1. Set up Google Analytics 4 if you haven’t already (it’s free)
2. Define your 5 key metrics from the Tier 1 and Tier 2 lists above
3. Create a simple spreadsheet with this month’s numbers
4. Set a calendar reminder to update it on the same day each month
5. Share it with someone — accountability makes reporting stick

Do this for three months consistently. You’ll be amazed at the patterns you spot and the decisions you can make with even this basic level of data.

Want Reporting Without the Headache?

At Black Sheep Marketing, we offer a fully automated reporting service from £325/month.

Here’s what you get:

• Weekly automated reports delivered every Monday morning
• Data from all your channels — Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4, e-commerce, email
• Clear, visual dashboards you can check any time
• Monthly insights call where we review the data together and recommend actions

Stop spending your Monday mornings wrestling with spreadsheets. Let us automate the data so you can focus on the strategy.

Set Up Automated Reporting →

Or if you’d prefer to build your own reporting, start with our guide to building a marketing dashboard that actually gets used.