Write a one-page monthly report that says what happened, why it happened and what to do next.
A dashboard shows the numbers. A report explains them. Your monthly report sits on top of the dashboard you set up in Module 6, and its job is to turn a month of data into a few sentences and a short list of actions.
Jun does the marketing reporting for a furniture shop. For a long time the shop's monthly report was four pages of screenshots from GA4, Instagram insights, Meta Ads Manager and a newsletter tool. The screenshots were accurate. They still told the owner nothing, because nobody wrote down what the numbers meant. The owner would ask, "So are we doing well?" Jun answered out loud and never on paper, so the explanation never reached the report.
The first line of the report answers the reader's question: how did we do? Write it as one sentence. It gives the main KPI from your measurement plan and compares it with the target and with the last period. Someone who reads only that sentence should know where the business stands.
Jun's October headline read: "October furniture sales were S$52,400, 5 percent above the S$50,000 target and 8 percent up on September." All of Jun's figures here are invented examples. The sentence has the KPI, the target and the previous month, and the reader needs nothing else to know how October went.
Don't soften the headline, and don't open with context. If the month was bad, say so in the first line. A reader who has to hunt for the bad news stops trusting the rest of the page.
Below the headline, explain only the two or three changes that most affected the result. Leave out the other numbers that moved. For each change, give four things: what changed, by how much, the likely cause, and the evidence.
Jun's first change was Google search. Enquiries from Google search rose from 38 to 61. Most of the rise went to the new sofa range pages, which went live on 3 October. The evidence is GA4's landing page report, which shows those pages brought 19 of the 61 enquiries.
The second change was Meta ads. Sales from Meta ads fell from 14 to 9 on similar spend. The ads have not changed since August, and the share of people clicking them has been falling for six weeks. That suggests people have seen the ads too many times.
The third change was the newsletter. Newsletter clicks fell by a third, while the send day and the list size stayed the same. The cause is not known, and the report should say exactly that. If you don't know why a number moved, write "we do not know". It is more useful than a reason you made up, and it tells the reader where to look next month.
Your data check from Lesson 9.1, "Check the data before you trust it", feeds into this section. If the check found a tracking problem that affected a number, name the problem in the same paragraph that discusses that number. Don't put it in a separate note at the end.
An observation is a fact anyone can check in the data. An interpretation is your best guess at the cause, which makes it a judgement. Both belong in the report. The trouble starts when they are blended into one sentence and the reader cannot tell which part is which.
"Meta sales fell because of ad fatigue" sounds like a fact, but it is a guess. Suppose the owner treats it as fact and pays for new ads, and the real cause was a competitor's sale that month. The new ads will not fix the problem, and nobody will know why.
Jun's Meta paragraph shows how to keep the two apart. The observations come first in their own sentences: sales fell from 14 to 9 on similar spend, the ads have not changed since August, and the click share has been falling for six weeks. The interpretation comes next in a separate sentence, marked with "suggests". Other judgement words do the same job, such as "probably" and "our best guess is". If you have tested an interpretation, say how. If you haven't, leave out any claim of a test, so the reader can see the question is still open.
End the report with three actions at most. If you list more than three, none of them get done properly. Each action needs a person responsible and a date. Each one should also follow from one of the changes you explained. If an action doesn't connect to anything above it, it probably belongs in a different conversation.
Jun's three actions, one for each explained change:
Refresh the Meta ad images and copy, with two new versions to compare. Owner: Jun. By 10 November. Add the sofa range pages to the Google Ads campaign as landing pages. Owner: the freelancer. By 7 November. Find out why newsletter clicks fell, starting with how the email displays on phones. Owner: Jun. By 14 November.
The whole report fits on one page, and that limit is on purpose. When a report runs longer, the reader skims it, and the important parts get the same attention as the trivia. Put any extra detail in an appendix, or leave it in the dashboard where anyone who wants it can find it.
Jun's October report had one headline sentence, three short explained changes and three actions. The owner read it in three minutes and asked one question, about the newsletter.
To try this, take one of your own old reports or dashboard summaries and rewrite it in this shape: a headline sentence, two or three explained changes with observations and interpretations kept apart, and no more than three actions, each with an owner and a date.
Take a past report or dashboard summary and rewrite it as one page: a headline sentence, three explained changes and three actions.
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