u/Slow-Economist-9242

Been going back through the clients who left and I'm not sure I read any of them right at the time.

Looking back the pattern is the same. The emails get shorter, they stop asking questions, and you tell yourself that means things are running smoothly.

I used to treat a quiet month as a good sign. Now I think quiet is just what it sounds like when someone is slowly losing track of what you actually do for them.

So which way do you play it. Do you check in on the quiet clients, or leave them alone because no news is good news?

Something has changed with client reports and I don't know how to think about it yet.

Used to be if a client didn't read the report, you'd just catch up on the call.

Now half of them paste the whole thing into ChatGPT and come back with questions that don't make sense. Why isn't the prospecting campaign generating revenue. Why did we spend more on retargeting. The AI is confidently answering things it has no context for and the client believes it.

So the reader isn't really the client anymore. It's the model the client's going to feed it into.

Anyone else running into this? Are you writing reports differently now, or just accepting that half your explanation is going to be relitigated by a chatbot that's never seen the account?

Been doing this for a while now and I've started to notice something.

I spend time putting together a proper monthly report. Performance summary, trends, what changed, recommendations. The whole thing.

Then on the call the client asks me a question that's literally answered on page one.

Starting to think most of them just scroll to the bottom number and ignore everything else. Which makes me wonder if I'm wasting hours writing context nobody looks at.

For those of you who've been at this longer than me. What part of your report do clients actually engage with? Is it the numbers? The written explanation? A specific section?

Trying to figure out if I should keep writing detailed commentary or just give them three lines and a chart.

I'm about six months into running my own agency and the part I dread every single month is writing the actual words that go alongside the numbers in a client report.

Pulling the data is fine. I can get the spend, the CPL, the ROAS, all of that. That part takes me maybe twenty minutes. But then I sit there for another two hours trying to write something underneath it that explains what happened in a way that doesn't sound like I'm either reading a textbook or desperately trying to spin a bad month into something positive.

The worst part is I know what I want to say. I can explain it perfectly fine on a call. But the second I try to write it down it either comes out way too formal and stiff, or it sounds like I'm apologising for everything even when the results are decent.

I've tried looking at templates online but they all feel generic. Like "performance remained consistent with the previous period" type stuff that says absolutely nothing and my clients would see right through it.

For anyone who's figured this out, what does your process actually look like? Do you follow a structure every time or do you just freestyle it?

And how long should it take a client to write up? Cause I'm spending too much time. If people are doing them in fifteen minutes, and I'm sat here for an hour +

Something I don't see talked about enough in agency growth conversations is how much client churn is actually caused by bad reporting rather than bad results.

I've seen situations where the ads are genuinely performing well, but the client doesn't understand the report, doesn't trust the numbers, and ends up leaving because they never felt confident their money was being well spent. The results were there. The communication wasn't.

On the flip side, I've seen accounts where performance dipped for a month, but the agency explained it so well what happened, why, and what they're doing about it that the client actually felt more confident afterwards, not less.

It's making me think the report itself is more of a retention tool than a performance summary. The agencies that grow seem to be the ones whose clients feel informed every single month, not just the ones running the best campaigns.

A few things I'm trying to figure out for my own process:

How much time do you spend on the narrative part of a report vs just pulling the numbers? Do you structure every client's report the same way, or customise it based on what they care about? Has anyone found a good way to automate the commentary without it sounding generic and AI-generated?

Curious how other agency owners are thinking about this, especially anyone who's scaled past 5-10 clients and had to systematise their reporting without losing quality.

Genuine question because this is the only part of the job that sucks.

I can read an ad account and see exactly what is happening. It's perfectly clear. That's the easy part.

The hard part is explaining to the clients who don't think in cpm, roas or Creatives etc they only see we spent more and got less and want to know why Then when I try to give a report to explain. I either sound too technical so they don't know what I'm talking about, or I simplify it too much that it sounds like I'm talking shit and making excuses

The good months are easy to explain But the bad months or the months Where it's not bad, but it's not what they wanted that where I'm struggling the most I just don't understand the language of how to break it down to them from a technical terms to what they would understand,

For people who have been doing this a while. How do you actually frame underperformance In a way that's honest, but doesn't make them lose confidence in you.?

Genuinely curious to see how other people handle this part of the job. Cause it's not really talked about.