A managing partner doesn't read a marketing report top to bottom. They open it, scan for one number, and decide in about four seconds whether the rest is worth fifteen minutes of their morning. That number is what it costs to sign a case. Not how many people clicked an ad. Not impressions, not CTR, not "engagement." Cost per signed case, and whether it's moving in the right direction.
I've built weekly reports for law firms long enough to see the pattern repeat: an agency sends a partner the same report it sends the marketing coordinator, and the partner stops opening it within a month. Not because the data is wrong. Because it's the wrong altitude. A coordinator wants detail. A partner wants a conclusion.
What a partner actually reads
Strip away everything else and a partner-level update needs three things: what it costs to sign a case right now, whether that's trending better or worse, and what you're doing about it if it isn't. Everything else in the report exists to support those three lines, not to replace them.
Cost per signed case, not cost per lead
Most legal ad reports stop at cost per case inquiry, because that's the number available in real time while signed-case data lags weeks or months behind intake and retention. That's a reasonable place for a weekly report to live. But a partner doesn't think in inquiries. They think in clients. If 40 inquiries came in at $95 each and 6 became signed clients, the number that actually matters to the partner is closer to $633 per signed case, not $95 per inquiry. A report that never makes that connection is asking the partner to do the division themselves, and most of them won't bother. They'll assume the number on the page is the number that matters, and it isn't. We've broken down how much that gap actually moves by case type in what personal injury and legal ad clients actually pay per case.
Case value, not raw cost
A cost-per-case number means nothing on its own. $600 to sign an auto accident case with an average settlement value of $8,000 is a very different story than $600 to sign a slip-and-fall claim worth a third of that. Partners run this math in their head whether or not you put it in the report. Do it for them and you look like you understand the business. Leave it out and you look like you're reporting on ad performance, which is a different thing than reporting on firm growth. Firms that run more than one practice area have an extra layer of this problem, which we cover in why a blended CPA hides personal injury vs. family law performance.
Trajectory, not a snapshot
One week of cost-per-case data is noise. A partner wants to know if the trend line is moving toward the target or away from it, against last month and against the number they agreed was acceptable when the campaign launched. A single up-or-down arrow next to the trend, with one sentence explaining why, does more work than a table of the last twelve weeks.
of clients prioritize long-term value and ROI over raw cost when evaluating an agency relationship, according to the ANA/4As "Cost of the Pitch II" study. A partner reading a report is running that same value calculation every week, whether the report acknowledges it or not.
What the coordinator or associate actually needs
Below the partner level, more detail isn't just acceptable, it's the point. A marketing coordinator or an associate managing the agency relationship wants campaign-level breakdowns, ad creative performance, which keywords are converting, and channel-by-channel splits between Google and Meta. That's the layer where you show your work.
The mistake isn't including that detail somewhere. The mistake is putting it at the top of the same document a partner opens. Two audiences reading the same report should see the same underlying numbers, at two different depths.
Partner line: "Cost per signed case is $612, down from $740 last month. Shift more budget into exact-match personal injury search."
Coordinator line: "Personal Injury – Exact Match delivered 21 inquiries at $68.14 each; Broad Match – All Practice Areas spent $1,240 for 9 inquiries at $137.78 each."
Same underlying data. Completely different job to do. One tells a partner whether to trust the spend. The other tells a coordinator where to make the next optimization.
One dataset, two levels of resolution
NarrateIQ writes the partner-level summary and the campaign-level detail from the same weekly pull, every Monday, without an agency having to build two separate reports for two separate audiences.
Book a free audit call →Build the partner summary first
Most reporting templates work backwards. They start with raw data and build up to a conclusion at the end, which means the partner has to read past everything they don't care about to reach the one line they do. Flip it. Lead with the recommended action and the number that matters, then let the detail follow for whoever wants it. Research on what clients actually want from a performance report backs this up directly: clients consistently want fewer, clearer metrics with an action attached instead of a wall of numbers, and a partner is the clearest example of that preference in the entire client base.
This isn't about hiding information from the coordinator or dumbing anything down for the partner. It's about matching the report to the reader. A partner who trusts the top line will scroll down eventually, on the weeks something looks off. A partner who has to hunt for the top line every week stops opening the report at all, and that's often how agencies discover a relationship was already on its way out, a pattern we've seen show up repeatedly in why PPC agencies lose half their clients a year. Our legal agency reporting is built around exactly this split: the partner gets the number and the call, the rest of the account team gets the detail.