Marketing Report Template: Free XLSX + PDF Sample

Most marketing reports fail in the same way. They present twenty accurate numbers and answer none of the three questions the reader actually has: did it work, why, and what happens next.

This template is built around those three questions. The numbers calculate themselves so that the time you spend goes into the parts that require judgement.

Preview of the file

The Monthly report tab. You type into the white cells; the shaded columns calculate themselves.

What is included in this digital marketing report template

The Excel workbook has three tabs:

Read me — how to use the workbook, and what separates a useful report from a data dump.
Monthly report — seven channel rows, with sessions, conversions, spend and revenue as inputs. Change versus the previous period, conversion rate, CPA and ROAS are all formulas. Commentary and next-action blocks sit directly underneath the table, in the same tab, so they cannot be overlooked.
KPI definitions — how each metric is calculated, agreed in advance.

The PDF sample is the same structure, completed for an illustrative business, so you can see the level of commentary that makes a report worth reading.

Which cells to type in

White cells are inputs. Shaded cells contain formulas — conversion rate, CPA, ROAS and month-on-month change — and overwriting one silently breaks that row. Every formula is wrapped in IFERROR, so a half-filled template shows blanks rather than a screen of #DIV/0!.

What metrics should a monthly report include?

Fewer than you think. A monthly report needs one primary metric and a small number of supporting ones. Everything else belongs in a dashboard that people can open when they want detail.

Every metric the workbook calculates, with the formula it uses — so you can check the arithmetic rather than trust it:

Metric	Formula	What it tells you
Impressions	Counted by the platform	How many times your listing or ad was shown.
Clicks	Counted by the platform	How many times someone clicked through to your site.
CTR	Clicks / Impressions	Click-through rate. How compelling the listing or ad is.
Sessions	Counted by analytics	Visits to the site, grouped into a single browsing session.
Conversions	Counted by analytics	Completed actions you defined as valuable.
Conversion rate	Conversions / Sessions	How efficiently traffic turns into action.
Spend	Sum of media cost	What you paid the platform in the period.
CPC	Spend / Clicks	Average cost of one click.
CPA	Spend / Conversions	Average cost to acquire one conversion.
Revenue	Counted by analytics or CRM	Value attributed to the channel in the period.
ROAS	Revenue / Spend	Return on ad spend, expressed as a multiple.

Every formula built into the workbook, so you can check the arithmetic rather than trust it.

Two cautions. ROAS per platform double counts when several platforms claim the same sale — the blended figure across all channels is the one that matches the bank account. And CPA excludes your own time, so it is not the same as customer acquisition cost; do not present it as if it were.

Digital marketing report example

Here is the completed report’s channel table, so you can see the format without downloading anything:

Channel	Sessions	Prev.	Conversions	Spend	Revenue
Organic search	8,420	7,610	168	£0	£20,160
Paid search	3,110	3,340	112	£4,200	£13,440
Paid social	2,480	1,950	44	£1,800	£5,280
Email	1,640	1,580	74	£0	£8,880
Organic social	910	1,020	9	£0	£1,080
Referral	620	540	14	£0	£1,680
Direct	2,050	2,010	61	£0	£7,320

The sample report's channel table — Example Co (illustrative), March 2026. Invented figures, shown to demonstrate the format.

The part worth studying is the commentary, because it is the bit a blank template cannot give you. A useful commentary line does three things: states what changed, gives the reason, and says whether the change was intentional.

Commentary

Organic search grew 10.6% month on month and produced the largest share of conversions at no media cost.
Paid search sessions fell 6.9% after pausing two low-intent campaigns. CPA improved as a result, so the drop was intentional.
Paid social scaled 27.2% but converts at roughly a third of the rate of paid search, so it stays a prospecting channel.
Organic social declined and has the weakest conversion contribution. Recommend reducing effort here next quarter.

Next actions

Expand the three organic landing pages that produced the most assisted conversions.
Rebuild the paused paid search campaigns around bottom-of-funnel terms only.
Run a subject-line test on the monthly email to lift open rate.
Cut scheduled organic social from five posts a week to two and move the time into email.

Invented figures for Example Co (illustrative), March 2026. The wording is what to copy — not the numbers, which are not benchmarks.

Read the paid search line specifically. A fall in sessions reads completely differently once the report says the drop followed pausing two low-intent campaigns and that cost per acquisition improved as a result. Without that sentence the reader sees a decline and draws their own conclusion — usually the wrong one, and usually in a meeting you are not in.

Example figures are illustrative

The numbers in the sample report are made up to demonstrate the format. They are not real client data and they are not benchmarks. Do not quote them to anyone as typical performance.

How to use it each month

Duplicate the Monthly report tab and rename it to the month. Keeping each month as its own tab means you retain a year of history in one file.
Fill in the previous period column first, then the current one. The change column needs both.
Enter spend and revenue only for channels that genuinely have them. Leave organic spend blank rather than entering zero — a zero produces a misleading 0.00 CPA rather than a blank.
Write the commentary. One line per meaningful change, with the reason.
Write next actions, each with a name and a date. An action with no owner is a wish.
Send it on the same working day each month, to a named person.

What I include in real reports

A few things I have learned to always include, and one thing I have learned to leave out:

The target, next to the number. A figure on its own is not information. “412 conversions” means nothing; “412 against a target of 380” is a finding.
A line for what I got wrong. If last month’s recommendation did not work, the report says so. This costs nothing and buys an enormous amount of credibility for the months when the news is good.
Deliberate decreases, labelled as deliberate. Pausing a wasteful campaign shows up as a decline in the data. If the report does not say it was intentional, someone will read it as underperformance.
What I leave out: platform-by-platform ROAS as a headline. It is the number clients most want to see and the one most likely to mislead, because every platform claims the same conversion. I report blended ROAS in the summary and keep per-platform figures further down.

The commentary takes me longer to write than the numbers take to gather. That ratio is the point.

Common mistakes

Reporting everything. A twelve-page report gets skimmed. A one-page report gets read and acted on.
No comparison. A number without a previous period or a target cannot be judged.
Vanity metrics near the top. Impressions and followers belong low down, if at all.
No next actions. If nothing changes between reports, the report is decoration.
Changing the structure every month. Consistency is what lets a reader spot a trend at a glance.
Sending it late. A report that arrives whenever it is ready trains people not to expect it.

Making it a Google Sheets template

The workbook is a standard .xlsx file, so it uploads to Google Drive and converts to Sheets directly — File, then Import. All the formulas used here (SUM, IFERROR, arithmetic) are identical in Sheets, so nothing breaks in translation. The cell shading that marks which columns are calculated survives the conversion too.