Sample report
This is the product.
A complete Honest Marketing Report, redacted and anonymised. Every member receives this same ten-section structure each month so you can compare one period to the next without relearning the format.
The business, figures and findings below are illustrative, drawn from the kinds of issues that come up most often in real reviews.
Honest Marketing Report
Redacted — Home services, South East Queensland
Reporting period 1–31 October · Channels reviewed: Google Ads, Meta Ads
Executive verdict
Spend is producing enquiries at an acceptable cost, but roughly a third of the reported conversions cannot be verified against the CRM. Do not approve the proposed budget increase until conversion counting is corrected.
Marketing Oversight Score
Marketing Oversight Score
Account ownership and accessweight 20
100%
Tracking and verificationweight 25
40%
Reporting clarityweight 20
65%
Management transparencyweight 20
55%
Commercial alignmentweight 15
47%
Spend and outcomes
Advertising spend
$8,420
+12% vs prior month
Agency fee
$1,950
Unchanged
Reported conversions
134
+18%
Verified in CRM
89
66% of reported
Cost per verified lead
$116
+9% vs prior month
Booked jobs attributed
21
Est. $47,300 revenue
Tracking confidence
Confidence in reported numbers: Low to moderate
- The Google Ads conversion action counts every phone-number click as a conversion, including repeat clicks from the same session.
- Meta and Google are both claiming the same 22 enquiries, so the two platform reports cannot be added together.
- The contact form fires its conversion event on page load rather than on submit, inflating counts by an estimated 15–20%.
- No offline conversion import is configured, so genuinely booked jobs are invisible to bid optimisation.
Lead or sale quality
- 89 verified enquiries reached the CRM. 21 became booked jobs — a 23.6% close rate, consistent with the prior three months.
- 17 enquiries were outside the stated service area. The campaign radius has not been tightened despite this being raised in August.
- Lead quality is not deteriorating; the reported volume is simply overstated.
Agency activity and testing
- Three new ad variations were added on 8 October. No test was documented and no winner has been declared.
- Search term review appears not to have been run — 38 irrelevant terms consumed $612 of spend.
- No changes were made to the Meta audience structure during the period.
- The account has 4 active campaigns; 1 has been paused since July but remains in the reporting.
Channel-by-channel findings
Google Ads
Needs attention$5,890
Brand and non-brand are combined in one campaign, so the reported cost per conversion is flattered by branded searches that would have converted anyway.
Meta Ads
On track$2,530
Creative is performing; cost per enquiry is stable at $71 and the top-performing video has not yet fatigued.
Issues requiring attention
Conversion counting is materially overstated
Approximately 34% of reported conversions cannot be matched to a CRM record. This affects every cost-per-conversion figure in the agency report.
Budget increase requested without a verified baseline
The proposed $3,000/month increase is justified using the reported conversion figure, not the verified one. On verified numbers the case is materially weaker.
Brand and non-brand spend are not separated
Without a split you cannot tell whether the agency is generating new demand or being paid to capture people already searching for you by name.
Wasted spend on irrelevant search terms
$612 in the period went to search terms with no commercial relevance. A negative keyword review has not been run since June.
A paused campaign is still included in reporting
It contributes no spend but inflates the apparent size of the account.
Questions for the agency
- 01Can you show me one reported conversion traced end to end — from the ad click through to the record in our CRM?
- 02What is our cost per conversion when brand searches are excluded?
- 03Which of the three ad variations added on 8 October won, and on what measure?
- 04Why has the service-area radius not been tightened after 17 out-of-area enquiries?
- 05Can you re-present the budget increase using CRM-verified conversions rather than platform-reported ones?
Recommended next actions
1. Do not approve the budget increase this month
Revisit once conversion counting has been corrected and one clean month has passed.
2. Fix the form conversion trigger
It should fire on successful submit, not page load. This is a 15-minute change.
3. Split brand and non-brand into separate campaigns
This is the single change that will most improve the honesty of your reporting.
4. Request a negative keyword review
Ask for it monthly, in writing, as part of the standard report.
5. Set up offline conversion import
Feeds booked jobs back to the platforms so bidding optimises toward revenue.
This is an illustrative example using anonymised figures. AgencyGuard reports are opinions based on the information supplied and are not findings of misconduct against any marketing provider.
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