The questions to ask any marketing report

You do not need to know marketing to know when a report is dodging you. You just need a few questions, and the confidence to keep asking until the answers make sense. Here are the ones I would want a firm owner to have in their back pocket, no matter who prepared the report.

Where did this number come from?

Every headline figure comes from somewhere: your own systems, or an outside platform’s estimate. Ask which. If the impressive number is the ad platform grading its own homework, treat it as a claim, not a fact. Your own first-party data is the one to trust.

Did this lead become a client?

This is the question most reports cannot answer. Leads and calls are easy to count. Whether they turned into signed matters lives in your case system, and if the report never connects the two, it is telling you about contacts, not clients. A good report ties marketing to signed cases, at least for the share it can trace.

What is this in a rate, not a total?

Totals flatter. Rates inform. “We drove two hundred leads” sounds great and means little. “Sign rate held at this level while cost per signed case dropped” tells you something you can act on. Ask for the rates: sign rate, cost per signed case, channel mix. Be wary of any report leading with a big attributed-dollar figure, because that number is the easiest one to inflate.

What happened to the channels that are not working?

An honest report shows you the losers as plainly as the winners. If everything is up and to the right, something is being hidden or cherry-picked. You want to see where money is being wasted, because that is where the easy improvement lives.

What do you do when the data is missing?

Feeds break. The honest answer is “we flag it and withhold the number until it is fixed.” The dishonest answer is a smooth chart with no gaps, ever, which usually means gaps are being filled with estimates. A report that will admit “we do not know this month” is a report you can trust the rest of the time.

Why this matters

These questions are not adversarial. A good marketer or agency will welcome them, because honest reporting is easier to defend than flattering reporting. If the answers get vague or defensive, that itself is the answer.

This is the standard Scout Recon is built to meet: first-party data, closed to signed cases, reported in rates, honest when a feed goes quiet. For the mechanics behind that, see what closed-loop attribution actually means. If you want a report that holds up to these questions, book a demo.