Clients do not leave because of bad performance. They leave because they lack confidence that you/your team can fix the problem, or the belief that you are the problem.
There’s one thing that stands true for any agency, regardless of the service they provide, client type, or service price point.
Communication makes or breaks the agency/client relationship and directly impacts the ability to succeed.
Here’s the thing: clients don’t hire agencies just to run ads. They hire us because we can execute faster, reduce their exposure to risk/failure, and bring expertise + process they don’t have in-house.
If a client leaves an agency, it’s likely because of one or more of the following reasons:
- A new decision-maker took over, and the agency did not do a good job of quickly building rapport with them and communicating the value they provide and the bottlenecks they’ve faced.
- Performance has been strong for too long, meeting frequency and reporting begin to slip, making the work look “easy” enough to move in-house or to a larger multi-service agency. (This one took me a while to spot and understand.) The client starts missing or pushing calls. Everything seems fine, and then they leave.
- Performance is poor, and one or more of these issues exist.
- The team has not built an effective relationship with the client.
- The team doesn’t do a good job of turning data reports into actionable insights, learnings, and action items to optimize performance.
- The client leaves calls unsure of what is happening and unconfident in the next steps.
That’s why communication and reporting matter more than most agencies realize. It’s not just a numbers recap. The way we structure reports and the way we communicate with them directly shape the client's perceived value they have for our teams and the level of trust they have in us to fix problems.
If you haven’t already seen our blog article on the audit process, I recommend reading it first before continuing. It lays the foundation for this article.
The biggest trap agencies fall into is treating reporting like a numbers dump: CPA, ROAS, CTR, and spend.
But clients aren’t paying for spreadsheets. They’re paying for clarity. They want to walk away knowing:
- What did we actually learn from performance?
- Why did specific creative work (or not)?
- How do the channel strategies relate to business objectives?
- What’s the plan to improve results moving forward?
Without those answers, even solid performance can feel like a black box. And when clients don’t understand the story behind the numbers, and leave calls unsure what the agency is working on, their confidence in the agency starts to erode.
What we report on
As I mentioned in this article outlining our audit process, we start by aligning with the KPIs that matter both to our client’s business and to us as an agency. If you’d like to see the KPIs we care about, give that article a read.
For media buying, we generally don’t just share performance by campaign or ad set name. We tailor performance reports to each client's objectives and the way they measure success.
A few examples:
- We work with the corporate entity for a restaurant chain, so we communicate performance by market.
- We work with a skincare brand and often communicate performance by new product launch.
- Communicate by hypothesis. In Q4 last year, we helped an outdoor product scale during BFCM by shifting messaging to “gifting for him.” To validate the hypothesis, we showed the client the following.
- 9/1/24 - 10/31/24 (Normal messaging)
- Male Purchases: 483 (CPA: $88.98)
- Female Purchases: 56 (CPA: $98.38)
- 11/1/24 - 12/10/24 (Gifting for him messaging)
- Male Purchases: 270 (CPA: $69.21)
- Female Purchases: 353 (CPA: $55.53)
- Year-Over-Year Growth: (11/1 - 12/10)
- Revenue: 263.98% increase
- CPA: 32.07% decrease
- Orders: 104.62% increase
- 9/1/24 - 10/31/24 (Normal messaging)
A few thoughts for media buying:
- Don’t celebrate in-platform results without looking overall business sales data on Shopify or elsewhere and considering the blended impact. You may think you’re succeeding, but if the client’s bottom line isn’t improving, they will start to feel like you don’t understand what you’re doing.
- Don’t just report on ROA and CPA; use the Audience Segment breakdowns to understand new customer ROA and CPA. If you don’t know how to do this, stop reading this article now and go figure that out. If you discover you’ve been attributing sales to existing customers, re-read the first point above and add exclusions ASAP.
For creative strategy, we connect reporting directly to our creative planning framework.
We don’t just show results at the ad level. Instead, we report across buckets and categories that mirror how we plan campaigns:
- Buckets → Trigger, Exploration, Evaluation, Offer ads (to ensure we’re covering the full buying journey).
- Categories → Messaging angles, creative themes, UGC creators, products, brief.
For both creative strategy and media buying, or frankly any service, it is essential to connect your work back to the business as a whole and provide the client with insights that show you understand things from a 1,000-foot view.
Also, you need to communicate things in a way that prepares your point of contact to easily and confidently relay the insights you share back to their team or managers. If you don’t, then you’re leaving it up to their familiarity with your specialty, which is a dangerous game.
For example, which sounds better to you if you were the client?
Option 1: The ad account saw a 15% increase in CTR, and the CPA declined by 22%. Three of the recent UGC videos were the top performers in the ad account. Our goal is to continue improving CTR and CPA.
Option 2: The account is moving in a positive direction with a 15% increase in CTR and a 22% decrease in the cost per purchase. Based on the data, we can see that using the self-care messaging when pushing the facial cleanser product is driving the results, and ads created by the UGC creator, Ellen, are driving 38% of the purchases in the account. In the short term, we plan to continue improving these two KPIs by iterating UGC ads with Ellen, as well as using the same UGC briefs across additional creators to diversify our creator ads.
Option 2 shifts reporting from numbers → into insights clients can repeat internally.
How we streamline reporting
My goal for our team is that they spend as little time as possible on finding and aggregating data, and instead spend their time using their expertise to make sense of the data. Here’s how we do that
Media buying
We use DataSlayer to pull data into Google Sheets. We pull revenue from Shopify and Amazon, and ad spend across all active channels. We have a custom tab set up in our GSheet template to give us blended performance of Shopify sales compared to all paid channels. We also have a section for clients that actively sell on Amazon to see a blended performance comparing all paid channels (including Amazon ads) to Shopify & Amazon revenue.
This Google Sheet template also displays key KPIs on a month-over-month basis, as well as rolling data for the last 8 weeks and daily data for the previous 90 days.
We do use TripleWhale for some clients, but their pricing model is not realistic for us to use it baked into our fees, and not all clients spend enough to actually need a third-party data source like TripleWhale or Northbeam.
Creative Strategy
The Google Sheet setup I mentioned above also had tabs for our creative strategy tracking, but we began to hit limitations with what that setup could do and how well we could communicate results with it, so we turned it into a software tool called DataAlly. Now, our team doesn’t spend any time organizing ads by category/tag we track, pulling reports, or tracking data across iterations. We can instantly see performance by bucket, category, angle, or creator. (Or anything else we track by) We can also view overall ad performance or track category performance by demographic breakdowns. This is a big help when trying to decide the age/gender of a UGC creator to work with. All of this frees up our team's time so they can focus on making sense of the data and planning upcoming briefs. And prospective/existing clients love the organized approach in how we operate.
How we report performance
Sharing the report
The process matters just as much as the data. We send clients their reports 2–3 days before the performance review call, paired with a Loom video walking through the highlights. This gives them time to digest the numbers, share internally, and prepare questions.
The call
An internal motto we go by is “getting on a call with a client should feel like catching up with a friend.” There has to be a mutual respect and connection between the client and the agency to see success, and breaking through the surface-level relationship helps make working through the tough times easier.
Since we’ve already shared the data report ahead of the call, when we get on the call, we’re not stuck recapping the previous time period; we’re planning ahead.
That shift changes everything. Clients feel more confident because they see a structured system, not just a reactive recap. And we spend the bulk of the conversation looking forward: new tests, iteration plans, and growth opportunities.
They walk away knowing:
- What worked
- Why it worked
- Insights they can execute across other parts of their marketing efforts
- What we’re doing next
A personal recommendation: Public speaking was a fear of mine early on, and that bled into feeling anxious for client calls. If anyone reading this feels the same or has someone on their team who gets nervous when speaking on client calls, I HIGHLY recommend joining Toastmasters. We personally reward our team by paying them $100 if they complete/record an ice breaker speech at their local in-person Toastmasters club.
Post-call
Say it with me, “If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.” Sending a post-call wrap-up email or Slack message to your client, CC’ing anyone on your team or theirs that needs to see it, is one of the most essential parts of the entire process. Why? It’s good to get written confirmation from the client that they are on board with the planned next steps (especially if there is an ad spend increase), and it acts as something to refer back to should confusion or questions arise in the coming weeks.
Our recap emails include
- Next steps
- Things needed from the agency
- Things needed from the client
- Updates from the client regarding new product launches, promotions, requests, etc
- Links to the performance reports
At the end of the day, reporting isn’t just about metrics; it’s about communicating value. Clients don’t stick around because you created a pretty KPI chart; they stick around because you help them understand what those numbers mean, why they matter, and how they’ll turn into results next month.
Our approach has not only improved retention but also increased prospective client referrals from existing clients.
