Applied guidance for the reporting framework and the report templates. Most reporting problems are not analysis problems, they’re agreement problems.
One source, always
Every report reads from the flat file. Not from a platform dashboard, not from an export someone made last week. Two sources produce two answers and no way to adjudicate between them, and the meeting becomes about which number is right instead of what to do.
If a figure can’t be produced from the flat file, that’s a gap in the flat file, not a reason to go around it.
Define the metric before you report it
Every metric in a report has a row in the marketing reporting data dictionary with one definition, one owner, and one grain. A metric invented for a single report is a metric nobody can reproduce next month.
Where two teams already use the same word differently, the dictionary is where that gets settled once.
Check the change log before writing the narrative
Most surprising movements have a boring cause: a budget shift, a tracking fix, a naming correction, a platform outage. Checking the change log first stops a reporting artifact being written up as performance, which is the fastest way to lose a report’s credibility.
Say what happened, then what you think it means, separately
Readers need to be able to disagree with your interpretation without disputing your numbers. Keeping the observation and the explanation in separate sentences makes that possible.
Blurred: “Conversions fell 12% because the new creative underperformed.”
Separated: “Conversions fell 12% week on week. The new creative launched Tuesday and carries most of the drop, though spend also shifted to a new audience the same day.”
Report writing concepts covers this in more depth.
Roll up, don’t rewrite
A monthly report is assembled from weeks that already reconciled. A quarterly report is assembled from months. Re-deriving a period from raw data produces a number that disagrees with the reports already sent, and someone will notice.
Report the counter-metric next to the north star
A number that only moves up is a number nobody is stress-testing. The counter-metric doesn’t need its own target, only visibility in the same report, so that improvement bought at a cost is visible as such.
File it, every time
Save each report to its archive. The archive is what makes the next period’s report possible without re-deriving anything, and it’s the only record of what was believed at the time.
The habits that cause trouble
Last modified on August 10, 2026
