Red Flag #5

The monthly report has no real month-over-month comparison on conversions

A monthly PPC report has exactly one job: tell you what changed in the last month, why it changed, and what the team is going to do about it. To do that job, the report has to have month-over-month comparison on the metrics that matter — specifically on conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rate, broken down by campaign or campaign group. If those columns aren’t in the deck, the report is doing a different job. The job it’s doing is making the agency feel renewable.

This is the single most diagnostic red flag on this list, because it costs nothing to produce a real report. The numbers exist in the platform. Pulling them takes ten minutes. Choosing not to put them in front of you is, almost always, a deliberate choice.

Why agencies do it

Three reasons, with the third being the one that should worry you.

Pre-formatted templates. Most agencies use a standard report template across all clients. The template was built once, by someone who optimised for “looks good in a presentation,” and it leads with totals because totals are easy to make look healthy. The agency doesn’t custom-build a template per client unless asked. Asking is enough to fix it on a half-decent agency.

Inertia. The report goes out. The client doesn’t ask for changes. The report keeps going out in the same format. Months go by. Years go by. Nobody is hiding anything, but nobody is showing you anything either. The cure is also asking.

Selection. This is the bad one. The numbers being shown are the numbers that look good. The numbers being omitted are the numbers that don’t. Month-over-month conversion comparison gets left out specifically because it would tell you that conversions have been slowly trending down for four months, while clicks and impressions have been trending up. The aggregate report shows a healthy account. The MoM trend on conversions tells the truth.

What it looks like in your report or account

The deck shows current-month totals (clicks, conversions, spend, ROAS) but no comparison column to last month or the same month last year.
Charts span only the current month, so trend direction is invisible.
Campaign-level breakdown exists but doesn’t include MoM deltas (changes from month to month).
The narrative paragraph at the top of the deck uses words like “steady,” “consistent,” or “in line with expectations” without telling you which expectations.
When you ask for a quarter-over-quarter view, you get a custom one-off pull and it takes three days to arrive. (That’s the tell — it should take ten minutes.)

What to ask your agency

The simplest possible request: “Going forward, the monthly report needs a column for last month and a column for the same month last year, on conversions, cost per conversion, conversion rate, and ROAS. Per campaign. With percentage deltas.”

You don’t need their permission. You’re telling them what the report looks like now.

Good answer

“Yes, we can have that in the next deck. We’ll add the trailing-six-month chart by default too — it’s a more honest read than month-over-month alone because it filters out single-month noise. The narrative will lead with the trend on conversions and CPL, and we’ll explicitly note any month where the trend is moving in the wrong direction.”

Bad answer

“We can look into customising the template. Our standard reporting framework was built around best-practice metrics. Adding too many comparison points can make the deck harder to read and may not tell the right story month to month given normal seasonality.”

What it means if you get the bad answer

The bad answer is the agency telling you, gently, that they don’t want to put MoM comparisons in writing. There is no other reason to push back on a request this small. The work is ten minutes. The data is in the platform. The only cost is that some months the numbers will tell an inconvenient story and the agency will have to explain it on the call instead of glossing over it.

Some version of this conversation is the test of whether the relationship is worth keeping. If you ask for a real reporting format and the agency says yes and delivers it within one cycle, you have an agency that can be partnered with even if other things on this list are also true. If you ask and you get pushback, soft language, or a quarter of delays, the reporting format isn’t the actual problem. The reporting format is the symptom of an agency-client relationship in which the agency has decided what you’re allowed to see.

The hardest part of fixing this isn’t technical. It’s the moment in the next report meeting when the new MoM column shows red on conversions and the agency has to actually explain why — and you, sitting in your seat, have to be ready to ask the follow-up question. That’s the moment this whole site exists for. If you want help preparing for it, send me a question.