Client reporting for agencies
Every agency knows the first-week-of-the-month feeling. The retainer work stops while someone assembles screenshots, exports charts, writes the same three paragraphs per client with different numbers, and hopes nothing got missed. Fifteen clients at 45 minutes each is a lost day and a half — every month, forever.
The obvious fix is automation, and a dozen tools will sell you it. But automated reporting has two failure modes of its own, and most agencies have met both.
Failure mode one: the unread report
Automated reports are usually data dumps — every metric the API returns, charted, with your logo at the top. Clients don't read them. You can tell, because nobody ever replies, and then one day the client says "we're just not sure what we're getting for the money" — while twelve unread reports sit in their inbox proving exactly what they're getting.
A report only defends the retainer if the client reads it, and clients read reports that are short, in their language, and about their business. Did last month go well? Which pages made the phone ring? What are you doing next? That's the report. Ours is seven pages, each answering one of those questions, with a hard rule that no jargon reaches the client — read the sample and judge.
Failure mode two: the bill that grows with you
Almost every reporting tool charges per client. That means your reporting bill is a tax on winning work — at an illustrative mid-teens rate per client: 10 clients ≈ £156 a month, 25 ≈ £390, 40 ≈ £624. The tool costs more precisely when you're busiest.
We price by plan instead: £39 a month up to 5 clients, £79 up to 20, £129 unlimited. Adding a client inside your plan costs nothing, so your cost per client falls as you grow — £3.95 each at 20 clients, £1.29 at 100. The numbers are on the pricing page, and if you're weighing us against a per-client dashboard tool, start with the AgencyAnalytics comparison. For the reporting-specific breakdown, see white label SEO reports.
What "automatic" should actually mean
A reporting tool has genuinely automated the job only when all of these are true:
- You don't build anything. No drag-and-drop dashboards, no widget libraries. Connect Google once, map each client to their properties, done. Setup is ten minutes, not a weekend.
- It sends itself. On a sensible date — the 4th, once Google's data has settled, not the 1st when it's still moving — from your sender name, to your client's inbox, with you copied in.
- It fails loudly, not silently. If a Google connection breaks, you get an email with a one-click fix — not a client asking where their report is.
- It writes the commentary. Numbers without interpretation just move the writing job back to you. The commentary should be generated from the data, checked against it so nothing is ever invented, and readable by someone who's never heard the word "impression".
- You can hold it before it sends. Trust is earned; review the first months before they go out, then stop bothering.
That list is the product spec we built to. It's also a fair checklist to run against anything else you're evaluating.
What it means for the agency's week
With reporting automated properly, the first week of the month becomes ordinary delivery time. The reports go out on the 4th; you're bcc'd on each one; the dashboard's only job is to be boring. Your involvement drops to reading the occasional reply from a client who — for the first time in a while — actually read their report.
14 days free, no card. Then £39, £79 or £129 a month — your whole client list, never per client.