Data Storytelling & Reporting

Reporting is where marketing either gets credit or gets dismissed. This is a collection of what I've learned building dashboards, tracing attribution without full CRM integrations, and figuring out how to communicate performance to clients and stakeholders, whether the results are good or bad.

Most of this comes down to one idea: the numbers only matter if someone can act on them. A pretty deck or a dashboard full of terms that no one understands won't survive a quarterly board review. Reports need to connect marketing activity to real business results without getting bogged down in metrics like impressions or engagement rate.

Connecting activity to revenue

Attribution is where most marketing reporting falls apart, especially without a fully integrated CRM. These posts are about getting from platform results to revenue using the tools you actually have.

• How to build an SEO pipeline dashboard in HubSpot (that actually proves ROI)

  A four-widget HubSpot dashboard that ties organic search to leads, pipeline, and revenue in about 20 minutes of setup.

• Attributing revenue and customers to paid ads without an integrated CRM

  Using a Google Sheets XLOOKUP to bridge the gap between ad platforms and sales data when there's no native integration.

• Solving Google Ads attribution with disconnected sales processes and no CRM link

  Persisting UTMs through a multi-step site journey and feeding qualified-lead value back into Google Ads when leads route through third-party distributors.

Choosing metrics that actually mean something

Not every metric deserves a slide, especially for clients with limited marketing knowledge. This is about showing how your campaigns reflect real business outcomes instead of the ones that are easiest to pull out of a dashboard.

• Moneyball for paid advertising: Media Efficiency Ratio (MER)

  A simple calculation that looks at spend against gross revenue, cutting through channel-level attribution debates to answer a more basic question: is marketing working?

• How to eliminate vanity metrics from PPC reports

  Impressions, CTR, and engagement rate rarely change what a team does next. A test for cutting vanity metrics from client reports, and what to report instead.

Automating the busywork

Automation can save time on repetitive exports and formatting.

• Using AI to write Google Ads scripts to automate campaign reporting

  How I used Claude to write a Google Ads script that automates monthly reporting into Google Sheets to save time on data pulls.

Is the data even right?

Data accuracy is crucial when connecting marketing activity to business results.

• How much Google Ads spend is hidden in the search terms report?

  An analysis of 13 B2B accounts found that most Search spend goes to terms Google never discloses.

• How close is Ahrefs organic traffic to reality?

  A comparison of Ahrefs' estimated traffic against GA4 for 19 client sites. Third-party tools are estimates, not gospel truth.

Last updated: September 2026