Blog: The CMO-Ready Marketing Report: What to Include (and What to Skip)

Turn your monthly marketing report into a decision-making tool, not just a data dump.

Monthly reporting time. Again. You’ve got dashboards, spreadsheets, maybe even a slide deck. But what your CMO really wants isn’t more data—it’s a narrative. A business-minded digital marketing performance report that answers three core questions:

1. What happened?
2. Why does it matter?
3. What should we do next?

At Silverback Strategies, we help in-house marketers transform their reporting from “Here are the numbers” to “Here’s what’s working, what’s not, and where we should go from here.” Let’s break down what to include in a digital marketing report that leadership will actually care about.

1. Start With Goals, Not Graphs

Your CMO isn’t tracking every click—they’re focused on growth and outcomes. So before you dive into channel stats, frame your report with business objectives. Are you driving a pipeline? Growing revenue? Supporting a product launch?

Every metric in your marketing performance report should ladder up to a strategic goal.

✅ Try this at the top of your report for example:

• Results: We hit 105% of our revenue target. 
• Why: We decreased our investment in paid brand search and reallocated those savings to more incremental channels, namely paid non-brand search and Meta prospecting, which led to incremental revenue from paid media increasing 25% YoY. 
• What’s next: We need to feed Meta’s algorithm more creative to sustain and improve performance now that Meta has more budget. 

This structure makes it easy for leadership to grasp the “so what” behind the metrics.

2. Focus on Business Impact, Not Vanity Metrics

It’s time to break up with platform-reported conversions and CPLs, unless they connect to something bigger. Instead, highlight metrics that show marketing’s incremental influence on the bottom line:

• Pipeline influenced
• Incremental Revenue generated
• Incremental ROI or ROAS
• Cost per net-new opportunity
• Lead-to-close conversion rate

You can include supporting metrics (like engagement), but keep the focus on outcomes over outputs.

✅ Quick framing example:

• What happened: Paid media campaigns attributed 217 new leads, and 186 of the leads happened because of the paid media campaigns
• Why it matters: 86% of the leads were incremental. 24% of them would have happened with or without the paid media campaigns running. 
• What’s next: We’ll test individual campaign types to understand the incremental value of each.

3. Show Channel Performance with Context

Your CMO doesn’t just want to see that “SEO traffic went up.” They want to know what that means and how it compares to other efforts.

Include a channel-by-channel snapshot with:

• What changed
• Why it happened
• How it compares to last month, last quarter, or industry benchmarks

Whether you’re using Looker Studio, HubSpot, Tableau, or exporting from GA4, the magic isn’t in the tool—it’s in how you explain what the data means.

Want to dig deeper? Read:
🔗 How to Create an SEO Report

4. Highlight Insights and Upcoming Tests

Don’t make your CMO decode the data. Do it for them.

At the end of each section—or in a dedicated “Insights & Next Steps” slide—summarize what the data means and what actions and tests are underway. Focus on three things:

• What’s working
  e.g. “Paid social campaigns drove 35% more MQLs this month thanks to refreshed creative.”
• What’s underperforming
  e.g. “Organic traffic dipped due to technical SEO issues uncovered during the site audit.”
• What you’re testing or changing
  e.g. “We’re running A/B tests on landing page CTAs to improve demo conversion rate.”

To make it even easier to digest, you can format each insight like this:

✅ Insight snapshot

• What happened: Email open rates dropped 10% MoM.
• Why it matters: It could impact nurture-to-lead conversion, since email is a major lead driver.
• What’s next: We’re testing new subject lines and segmentation starting next week.

This approach turns your report from a retrospective into a roadmap—giving your CMO a clear view of where marketing’s headed and why.

5. Keep the Format Executive-Ready

Your audience is short on time—and probably reviewing this between meetings.

Make your digital marketing report easy to scan and act on:

• Use bolded takeaways, headers, and bullets
• Avoid unlabeled screenshots or raw data tables
• Highlight three essentials on one slide: Wins, roadblocks, and upcoming shifts
• Keep visuals clean, with clear callouts on key takeaways

✅ Bonus: Create a one-page “Executive Summary” slide at the front—some CMOs will only read that.

Why Silverback Strategies?

We know that great digital marketing reporting isn’t about showing everything—it’s about showing what matters.

At Silverback:

• We help in-house teams deliver clear, strategic performance reports that speak leadership’s language
• We connect channel performance (SEO, paid media, and more) to revenue, pipeline, and business goals
• We customize reports to match your internal structure—whether that’s OKRs, quarterly KPIs, or growth initiatives
• We help you shift from reactive reporting to insight-driven storytelling that builds credibility and drives smarter decisions

Let’s Turn Your Next Report Into a Strategic Win

We help in-house marketers impress their CMOs with reporting that’s clear, smart, and actually moves the business forward.
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Check out our guide to How to Create an SEO Report for more ways to turn insight into impact.