A monthly report from your ecommerce advertising company should explain what the business earned, what acquisition cost and what needs to change next. Spend, clicks and platform-reported return on ad spend are useful inputs, but they do not establish whether advertising delivered profitable growth.
For retail leaders, the report should be a decision document rather than a dashboard export. It needs reconciled numbers, clearly labeled measurement limits and actions assigned to people who can execute them. Here is what to request, how to assess it and which omissions deserve a follow-up.
Start with a one-page executive summary
The opening page should make the month understandable without requiring you to inspect every campaign. Ask for actual results against budget and target, with comparisons to the previous month and the same period last year where meaningful.
The written commentary should answer four questions:
- What changed? Identify the largest movements in spend, sales, acquisition costs and customer mix.
- What explains the movement? Separate measured changes from possible explanations, such as promotions, stockouts or auction competition.
- What is uncertain? Flag incomplete refunds, tracking problems, attribution delays or tests that have not reached a useful conclusion.
- What requires a decision? Specify budget changes, creative approvals, site fixes or additional measurement work.
Include context that affects comparisons. A five-week trading period, a shifted promotion or fewer in-stock bestsellers can make otherwise accurate numbers misleading. The summary should state these differences before drawing conclusions about performance.
The scorecard your ecommerce advertising company should deliver
A useful scorecard connects advertising activity to business outcomes while keeping different measurement systems separate. Agree on definitions before the first reporting cycle so that each month uses the same calculation.
| Reporting area | Core measures | What the report must clarify |
|---|---|---|
| Budget control | Actual media spend, planned spend and variance | Which accounts, channels and currencies are included |
| Store performance | Net sales, orders and average order value | Treatment of discounts, cancellations, refunds, tax and shipping |
| Acquisition | New customers and acquisition cost | Customer identification method and included costs |
| Advertising attribution | Attributed revenue, conversions and ROAS | Platform, attribution model and conversion window |
| Blended efficiency | Store net sales divided by total media spend | That the result includes demand from all sources |
| Customer quality | New-customer sales, repeat purchases and cohort revenue | Cohort dates and elapsed observation period |
| Commercial return | Contribution under the agreed cost model | Which product, fulfillment, marketing and service costs are deducted |
Show targets beside actuals and explain material deviations. A percentage change without its underlying value can exaggerate a small movement or hide a large financial shortfall.
Your ecommerce advertising company should also identify the source and reporting cutoff for every headline metric. Finance-approved sales, analytics revenue and advertising-platform revenue should not share an unlabeled “revenue” column.
Reconcile revenue before interpreting ROAS
The report should distinguish three views: what advertising platforms attribute to their campaigns, what analytics attributes under its chosen model and what the order system records as sales.
These views answer different questions. Two platforms may both claim influence over the same purchase, so adding their attributed revenue can double-count orders. Analytics may miss activity because of consent choices or tracking failures. Order records can include transactions that advertising did not generate.
Ask for a short reconciliation note covering the main differences: attribution windows, time zones, currency conversion, tax treatment, returns and duplicate purchase events. It should identify the size of material discrepancies where measurable, not merely state that systems “never match.”
An ecommerce advertising company should label figures as provisional when conversion or refund data is still developing. Preserve the original monthly snapshot and show later revisions separately rather than silently changing prior results.
For retailers with assisted sales or longer purchase cycles, CRM outcomes may also need reconciliation with completed orders. Dr. CRM’s guide to CRM reports for data-based decisions, available in Hungarian, offers related context on reporting sales, retention and revenue from customer records.
Show acquisition costs and customer quality together
Acquisition reporting needs more than a single cost-per-purchase figure. At minimum, distinguish first-time customers from returning buyers and specify how customer identity is resolved across orders.
Define media-only acquisition cost separately from a broader figure that includes agreed agency fees, creative production or other acquisition expenses. For example, $20,000 in media spend divided by 400 new customers produces a blended media acquisition cost of $50. Including another $4,000 in agreed acquisition expenses raises that figure to $60.
Those calculations are illustrative, not benchmarks. If the denominator includes all new store customers, the result is a blended measure, not proof that advertising acquired each customer.
Your ecommerce advertising company should pair acquisition cost with customer-quality indicators, such as first-order net sales and repeat purchasing within a defined period. Compare cohorts at the same age: a group acquired last month has had less time to reorder than one acquired six months ago.
When contribution is reported, document the cost scope with finance. The principles behind how advertising agencies can protect retail margins help frame that discussion; monthly reporting should then apply the agreed definitions consistently.
Explain channel and creative performance without burying the reader
Channel detail belongs behind the executive summary. Break down results by campaign purpose, such as prospecting, remarketing and branded search, where that distinction is available and meaningful.
The commentary should explain whether stronger aggregate results came from finding new customers or from capturing more existing demand. Include spend and conversion volume alongside efficiency metrics so that a small campaign with exceptional ROAS does not distract from a larger budget problem.
Creative reporting should identify the concept tested, audience, offer, landing page and amount of exposure. Report business outcomes alongside diagnostic measures such as click-through rate. A higher click-through rate does not establish that an ad attracts customers who buy.
An ecommerce advertising company should avoid declaring a creative winner from a handful of purchases or unequal delivery. State whether the comparison was a controlled test or an observational comparison affected by platform allocation.
Record which assets launched, which remained in use and which were retired. If a planned test did not run, explain the dependency that blocked it. This makes the report useful for creative planning rather than simply ranking thumbnails by last month’s attributed revenue.
Separate advertising problems from storefront problems
Paid traffic performance depends on the shopping experience after the click. Monthly reporting should therefore include enough storefront evidence to distinguish an acquisition issue from a conversion issue.
Review landing-page conversion, product availability, checkout completion and purchase-tracking reliability. Segment by device or important landing-page groups when the volume supports it. An overall conversion rate can hide a mobile checkout problem or an unavailable product promoted by a successful campaign.
Your ecommerce advertising company should flag site-related findings even when another partner owns implementation. It should provide the affected pages, evidence, estimated scope and recommended owner rather than treating every decline as a bidding problem.
For performance monitoring, Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance defines loading, responsiveness and visual-stability measures. Report field data when available, distinguish it from lab tests and note that field measurements commonly reflect a rolling period rather than one calendar month.
A slow page appearing alongside weaker conversion is a reason to investigate, not proof of causation. Record whether a site change occurred and whether the available evidence supports its effect on shopping behavior.
Report experiments separately from attributed results
Monthly reports should maintain an experiment log, including tests that are inconclusive or still running. For each test, state the hypothesis, method, primary outcome measure, dates and known limitations.
Distinguish platform optimization tests from incrementality tests. Comparing two ad variations can help choose a creative approach, but it does not establish how many purchases would have happened without advertising. A suitable holdout or geographic experiment can address that different question, subject to its design and uncertainty.
Ask the agency to distinguish measured lift from an attributed revenue increase. If no incrementality test ran during the month, the report should say so rather than imply that ordinary campaign reporting proves incremental growth.
An ecommerce advertising company should explain what each experiment changed in the operating plan. A completed test without a documented decision becomes reporting activity rather than useful learning.
Some experiments need longer than a month. Carry them forward with their status, expected decision date and any changes to the original design. Avoid repeatedly checking results and stopping a test simply because a favorable number appears.
Finish with next month’s decisions and accountable owners
The report should close with a short action register, not a generic promise to “continue optimizing.” Each action needs an owner, deadline, success measure and any dependency that could prevent delivery.
Separate actions the agency can execute from those requiring retailer approval or another team’s work. Budget reallocations, new creative production, feed repairs and checkout changes have different owners and lead times. The report should make those handoffs explicit.
Include a delivery ledger comparing promised work with completed work. Record delayed launches, missing approvals and unplanned incident response. This provides accountability for the service itself, not just the results influenced by seasonality, inventory and customer behavior.
Your ecommerce advertising company should recommend budget changes with assumptions and downside risks, not just a larger spending request. Explain what evidence would justify increasing, maintaining or reducing investment and when the recommendation will be reviewed.
When responsibilities are unclear, defining what an ecommerce agency retainer should include can help separate ongoing obligations from separately scoped work.
Agree on a delivery date after the relevant data is available and schedule the review close enough to influence the next trading period.
Frequently asked questions
Is ROAS enough for a monthly advertising report? No. ROAS describes attributed revenue relative to ad spend under a particular measurement setup. It does not account for every operating cost, reliably distinguish new from existing demand or prove incremental sales. Pair it with reconciled store sales, acquisition costs and agreed commercial measures.
Should the report include every campaign and ad? Keep detailed exports available, but lead with decisions and material changes. Retail leaders need enough detail to verify conclusions without reviewing every line item. Campaign-level appendices are useful when they explain a variance, support a test result or document an action.
How should an ecommerce advertising company report incomplete data? Label affected figures as provisional, explain what is missing and state when an update is expected. Preserve the original report so that later conversion or refund adjustments remain visible. A missing measurement should not appear as zero.
What should happen during the monthly review meeting? Confirm the numbers, challenge unsupported explanations and approve the action register. End with named owners and deadlines. If a decision remains blocked, record the missing evidence or approval rather than leaving the issue open without accountability.
Connect reporting to improvements your team can deliver
Advertising reports become more useful when acquisition data connects to storefront performance, customer experience and engineering priorities. Space Dinosaurs supports retail brands with analytics and KPI tracking, performance optimization, UX design and e-commerce engineering.
If monthly reviews repeatedly reveal site issues without a clear implementation path, explore Space Dinosaurs’ retail-focused digital services to connect those findings with practical storefront improvements.