Prepared for: Pelican Point Outfitters (fictional example) · August 2026 · delivered September 4
August did what August is supposed to do, and slightly better: 214 booked trips against 189 in the same month last year, at a cost per booking that came down 11%. The Labor Day package page you approved on the 12th carried more of that than we expected — it took 31 bookings in nineteen days and is now the second-best-performing page on the site. The thing that needs your attention is paid social: spend is up 18% and bookings from it are flat, which we read as audience fatigue rather than creative, and we want to pause the retargeting set rather than keep feeding it. There is a decision on that below, and we need it by the 20th.
Sources: booked trips and direct share from your booking system; cost per booking from Google Ads and Meta spend reconciled against those bookings. The grayed figures are month-over-month and are shown for completeness, not for conclusions — July is your peak, so being down against it is the calendar, not the marketing. Anything in this report that carries a judgment is compared to the same month last year.
| Date | What we did | Where | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 4 | Rebuilt the booking conversion after the plugin update moved the confirmation step | Tracking | Shipped |
| Aug 7 | Search-terms sweep — 9 of 41 queries added as negatives (the rental family: renters, not buyers) | Google Ads | Shipped |
| Aug 12 | Built and published the Labor Day package page from your copy | Website | Shipped |
| Aug 18 | Two new creative variants from the summer shoot live; the fatigued pair retired | Paid social | Shipped |
| Aug 21 | Structured data added to the six trip pages so answer engines can read durations and prices | AI visibility | Shipped |
| Aug 26 | Autumn email sequence drafted — three emails, with you for approval | In progress | |
| Aug 28 | Guide headshots for the About page — waiting on the photos from you | Website | Blocked on you |
This section exists because “is anyone actually doing anything?” is the question behind most agency relationships that end. If a month's list is ever empty, ask us why.
The retargeting set has now been shown to the same audience often enough that it has stopped working — frequency is 6.2 against a 3.0 target, and cost per booking from that set has roughly doubled since June. The prospecting set is still performing and should be left alone. This is not a creative problem; new creative into the same exhausted audience buys about a fortnight.
Decision needed by the 20th: pause the retargeting set and move that budget to prospecting?31 bookings in nineteen days from a single page. The pattern looks like specificity: one dated offer, one thing to do. Your evergreen trip pages ask a visitor to choose between five options before doing anything, and they convert at roughly half the rate.
Decision needed by the 15th: build the same shape for the autumn dates?You now appear in answers about half-day paddle trips on two of the four engines we track — about a fortnight after the structured data went on. Two engines still name competitors only, which is roughly the timeline we would expect. We will keep watching rather than act on a fortnight of data.
No decision needed — reported so you can see what the 21 August work bought.It's in your own Google account, it refreshes on its own, and it's there whenever you want to look mid-month. What it can't do is tell you that a frequency of 6.2 is why paid social stopped working, or that being down against July is the season. That part takes a person, and that person signs this report.
| When | What | Depends on |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Autumn rate block and season copy live; email sequence sends once you approve the drafts | Your approval |
| Week 2 | Retargeting decision actioned either way, and the budget moved | Your answer by the 20th |
| Week 3 | Autumn dated-offer page, if approved — same shape as the Labor Day one | Your answer by the 15th |
| Ongoing | Answer-engine tracking on the six trip pages; search-terms sweep; budget pacing | Nothing |
The analytics property, the tag manager container, the ad accounts, the dashboards and this report archive are all in your name and stay that way. If you ever leave there is nothing to hand back, because none of it was ever ours — we remove our access and that's the end of it. No exit fee, no charge for the handover, and no dashboard that stops working when the invoices do.
Every plan includes this report monthly, written by the person running your account — not exported from a dashboard. Questions about yours take a reply, not a meeting.
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