Monthly commentary is the part of a client report people actually read. The table already has the numbers. The writing has to say what changed, whether it matters, and what you want to do next.
Start from the scorecard, not a story
Pull the export first. Spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, and revenue should be totaled in the sheet before a sentence is drafted. If a prior month is available, put the two periods side by side. Commentary that leads with a narrative and then hunts for numbers to support it is how reports drift.
Name the period and the source in the first line. "October paid search" is more useful than "this month we saw strong performance."
Say what moved, then what it means
A useful paragraph has three beats:
- The change, with the figure.
- Whether that change is good for this client.
- The limit of what the export can prove.
Efficiency can improve while revenue falls. A lower CPA is not automatically a win if the account stopped spending on the campaigns that create demand. Say both things.
When the data does not show a cause, label the cause as a hypothesis. "CPA fell 18% after we paused the competitor campaign" is a finding. "People were more ready to buy" is a guess, and it should be written that way.
Keep the recommendation specific
End with one decision, not a list of best practices. Protect the campaign that is carrying the account. Cap the one that spent without conversions. Ask the client to confirm the conversion definition did not change before you treat a jump as incremental sales.
If you only have one month of data, say so. The next report is more valuable when it can compare, so save the export and the column mapping and reuse them.
What to leave out
Skip adjectives that are not tied to a number. Skip a second explanation of how click-through rate is calculated. Skip any result that is not in the export. Clients trust a short report that matches the table more than a long one that sounds confident.