What to put in a monthly client report (and what to leave out)
Most monthly client reports fail the same way: too long, too full of numbers nobody asked for, and they read like a tool generated them — because one did.
A good client report is short, honest, and answers the only question your client actually has: is the thing I’m paying for working?
Here’s what earns its place, what doesn’t, and why the format matters as much as the contents.
Lead with what the client cares about
Your client is not an analyst. They don’t log into dashboards. They don’t know what a “bounce rate” is, and if you explain it, they still won’t care.
What they do care about: are people finding the site, are those people doing anything useful, and did anything break. That’s the whole list. Every line in the report should serve one of those three questions. If a number doesn’t, cut it.
What to include
1. Visitors — and the direction of travel. The headline is how many people came. But the number alone means nothing to a client. “1,240 visitors” tells them nothing; “1,240 visitors, up 8% on last month” tells them a story. Always show the comparison.
2. Where they came from. Top sources — search, direct, referral, social. This is where a client starts to see the value of your work: “search traffic’s up since we redid the page titles.” It connects what you did to what happened.
3. What they looked at. Top pages. Useful, and occasionally revealing — clients are often surprised which page does the heavy lifting. It opens the conversation about where to invest next month.
4. Enquiries — or whatever counts as a conversion. This is the line that justifies the retainer. A contact-form submission, a phone tap, a booking. If you can measure the thing that makes the client money, it goes near the top, not buried at the bottom.
5. Uptime. The quietest, most underrated line in the report. “Site was up 99.9% this month, no incidents.” Your client doesn’t lie awake over pageviews — they worry the site’s down and nobody told them. (We wrote a whole post on why uptime is the cheapest trust you can buy.)
What to leave out
Bounce rate, on its own. The most misunderstood metric in analytics, and almost guaranteed to prompt a worried email. Unless you’re going to interpret it, don’t show it.
Raw pageviews with no context. A big number with nothing to compare it against is decoration, not information.
Anything you can’t explain in one sentence. If a metric needs a paragraph of caveats, your client won’t read the paragraph — they’ll just feel uneasy. Cut it.
The twelve-page dashboard. Every metric you add dilutes the ones that matter. A report that says six true things beats one that says forty.
The format matters as much as the numbers
Here’s the part most agencies miss: how you send the report decides whether it gets read.
A PDF attachment doesn’t get opened. A “log in to view your dashboard” link gets ignored. The report that gets read is the one already in front of the client — an email, in their inbox, that takes thirty seconds to scan.
And it has to arrive on a schedule. A report that turns up on the 1st of every month becomes a rhythm the client expects and trusts. A report that turns up “whenever I get round to it” becomes a justification exercise.
The shortest report that works
Stripped to the bone, a good monthly client report is:
- One line of greeting, in your voice
- Visitors, with the month-on-month change
- Top sources and top pages
- Enquiries or conversions
- Uptime
- One line of closing — what you’re focusing on next month
That’s it. It fits on a phone screen. It reads like a letter, not a spreadsheet.
This is, more or less, exactly what SendTidings sends: connect your analytics, set the schedule, and a report like this lands in your client’s inbox on the 1st of every month — automatically. See the plans, or how it compares to the tools you might be using now.
— Josh