Most business owners read an agency's monthly report the way they read a temple notice board: they look at the pictures, nod, and leave without understanding a word. A chartered accountant reads differently. A CA never starts with the summary a report offers; a CA starts with the questions the report should answer, and checks whether the numbers inside actually answer them.
This post gives you the CA's method. Twelve checks. Run any marketing report — ours or anyone else's — through these checks in fifteen minutes, and you will know whether the money is working before the next meeting, not the next quarter.
The CA's First Rule: Statements Before Summaries
An auditor never trusts a summary page. Summaries are written by the party being audited. Before reading a single slide, a CA asks for three raw statements. Ask your agency for the same three:
- The platform invoice — the actual Google Ads / Meta invoice for the month, in rupees, GST included. This is the only number nobody can inflate.
- The account export — a CSV from the ad account itself, not a screenshot. If the agency runs ads in their own account instead of yours, this is where you find out.
- The enquiry log — every call, WhatsApp chat and form fill with date and time. Enquiries are events; events leave timestamps.
If an agency hesitates to hand these over, the report has already told you what you need to know. And if the ads do not run inside your account, that is not your asset growing — it is theirs. You own your accounts is rule number one here for exactly this reason.
Check that the spend number in the report matches the platform invoice. Every other number in the report depends on this one. If spend is understated, cost per lead is flattered and every ratio that follows is fiction.
Check 1: Spend vs Invoice (The Foundation Test)
Take the report's "total spend" and put it beside the invoice. They should match to the rupee. When they differ, the report is usually quoting "budget spent" while the invoice includes fees, taxes or a second campaign nobody mentioned. A report that fails this check does not deserve the next eleven checks — fix it or walk.
Check 2: The Three Numbers That Pay You
Everything else is decoration. A report earns its fee if it clearly states:
- Enquiries — phone calls over 30 seconds, WhatsApp conversations started, form fills verified. Not "leads" — verified enquiries, with the log to prove it.
- Cost per enquiry — spend ÷ verified enquiries. This single number, tracked week over week, tells you more than any chart.
- Customers won — how many of those enquiries became paying customers. If the report stops at enquiries, the agency is measuring their job, not your business.
Impressions, reach, likes, video views — these describe the weather, not your harvest. A report with twelve charts and none of these three numbers is decorating a lack of results.
Check 3: The Conversion Column Exists
Open the account export. Somewhere near the campaign table there should be a "Conversions" column with real numbers in it. If that column is zero, empty, or missing, the campaign is blind — it is spending toward a target nobody wired up. This is the single most common failure we see when auditing accounts run by other agencies: money spent for months with conversion tracking never installed, so every optimization decision was a guess.
Check 4: One Week's Sample, Recounted by Hand
A CA does not recheck every transaction; a CA samples. Pick any one week in the report. Count the enquiry log entries: calls, WhatsApps, forms. Compare against the report's claim for that week. If the report says 22 enquiries and the log holds 14 — of which 6 were selling you solar panels — you now know the report's "lead" definition includes people who will never buy from you. Definitions are where reports hide.
There is no honest single number — it depends on what you sell and what a customer is worth to you. A ₹200 enquiry can be excellent for a café and a disaster for a builder. The professional test is not "is my CPL good" but "is my cost per enquiry under 10-20% of what one new customer is worth to me". Judge the ratio, not the rupee figure. Anyone quoting you a universal "good CPL" is quoting a metro benchmark that does not know your margins.
Check 5: Search Terms, Not Keywords
The keywords you bought are not what people typed. The search terms report shows what they actually typed — including the "free", "jobs", "salary" and "diy" searches that silently eat budget. A report worth paying for shows the search terms report and the negative keyword list growing month over month. An account whose negative list never grows is an account nobody is tending.
Check 6: Reply Speed Under the Microscope
Enquiries that get answered in five minutes convert several times better than enquiries answered next afternoon. Your report should show response times — or you should demand them. If your report shows 40 enquiries and you only remember 12 conversations, the missing 28 died in a pile of missed calls. That is not a marketing failure; it is a reply-speed failure, and it is the cheapest fix in this entire post.
Check 7: The Trend Beats the Total
Do not ask "how many leads this month". Ask "what did cost per enquiry do in week 1, 2, 3, 4". A healthy account is a sawtooth: test, learn, drop, repeat. A flat line for three straight months means nobody is experimenting — you are paying a subscription, not a growth service. A rising cost per enquiry with flat spend means the well is drying; the account needs new creative or new audiences, and your report should have said so before you noticed.
Check 8: Attribution Confession
Every reporting system has a blind spot and a professional report confesses its own. Phone calls that rang the shop's landline — were they counted? A customer who saw the ad Tuesday and walked in Saturday — counted or not? The report that claims perfect attribution is lying to you. The report that says "we count X, we do not yet count Y, here is how we will" is the one run by professionals. This is exactly why the free audit at LocaLeAd ends with tracking, not promises: untracked marketing is unauditable, and unauditable marketing is unmanageable.
Check 9: Does the Report Ask You for Anything?
The strangest and most telling test. A real growth report contains requests: "we need 10 photos of the new counter", "the offer expires Friday, approve the festive creative", "send us the three questions customers most ask". Marketing is a partnership between the business and the marketer; a report with zero requests means the agency has stopped needing you, which usually means it has stopped trying.
Check 10: Benchmarks Named With Sources
If the report compares you to "industry benchmarks", demand the source and the date. Benchmarks without provenance are bedtime stories. Numbers from Google's own platform benchmarks, or from your own account history, are facts. Anything else is marketing for the marketing.
Check 11: Next Month's Plan in Writing
A CA's audit ends with an opinion and a management letter — what should be done next. So should a marketing report. Three lines are enough: what we will test, what we will stop, what we need from you. If next month's plan is "continue", you are paying for a calendar, not a strategy.
Check 12: The Silence Test
The strongest check costs nothing. Do not open the report at all. Instead, count what you know without it: Did the phone ring more this month? Did WhatsApp queries rise? Did walk-ins mention the ad? Your own memory of your own business is the one dataset no agency can manipulate. When the report and your counter disagree for three consecutive months, trust your counter — and start the conversation with the invoice from Check 1.
No honest agency can, and this post is part of the proof. What a professional agency can guarantee is the opposite of a report problem: full account ownership from day one, conversion tracking installed before spend begins, raw exports available on demand, and a month-to-month relationship where the report must earn next month's trust instead of hiding behind a 12-month contract. Guarantees of specific lead numbers are a sales tactic; guarantees of process are a professional standard.
The Fifteen-Minute Audit Checklist
Print this. Next report, tick as you go:
- ☐ Spend matches invoice to the rupee
- ☐ Enquiries are verified, with a log
- ☐ Cost per enquiry shown, trended weekly
- ☐ Customers won — not just enquiries
- ☐ Conversions column has real numbers in the export
- ☐ One week recounted by hand, matches
- ☐ Search terms + growing negative list
- ☐ Reply speeds shown
- ☐ Week-over-week trend, not just totals
- ☐ Attribution blind spots confessed
- ☐ Report asks something of you
- ☐ Benchmarks carry a source
- ☐ Next month's plan in writing
Score below 8 of 13 and the report — not your business — is what needs fixing.
Why We Wrote This
We are a young agency in Warangal. You will not find client logos on this page, because we have none yet — and we will not invent them. What we can do is hand you the audit checklist we run against our own work every month, and invite you to use it against any agency you ever hire, including us.
If you would rather have a professional set of eyes on your current marketing — the accounts, the tracking, the reports you have been nodding at — that is exactly what the free 20-point marketing audit is for. No pitch, no retainer talk before it. Want a second opinion on your marketing reports? Get the free audit or message us on WhatsApp.