Holiday quarter reporting, and what to stop promising

For the agencies we fulfil for, October is two jobs at once. Every client wants to know what the last six weeks did to their traffic and their leads, and every renewal conversation for next year happens before the holidays.

Three things have already settled that change what belongs in a report this quarter. Google’s September core update finished rolling out at the end of last month. The helpful content update has been live since late August. And the automatic upgrades of Smart Shopping and Local campaigns into Performance Max have now worked their way through the accounts we manage.

None of these can be left out and explained later. A client sees a line move, asks their account manager, and the answer arrives a month after the question. Here is what we are putting in reports, what we have taken out, and what we are telling partner agencies to stop promising.

Two search updates, one paragraph, written now

Two updates in six weeks is enough movement that most local accounts look different than they did in August, and not always in the direction anyone wants.

Write the explanation once, in plain language, and put it in every affected client’s report this month rather than waiting to be asked. Four things make that paragraph honest:

• Date the chart. Put a vertical line on the traffic graph for 25 August and one for 12 September. Half of “what happened to us” is answered by showing when it happened.
• Split branded from non-branded. Branded search for a local business barely moves during a core update. If the drop is all non-branded, say so, because that is a different conversation than “people stopped looking for you”.
• Split the map pack from the organic links. Local pack visibility and web rankings move independently, and a client who lost one and kept the other has not lost what they think they lost.
• Do not blame the update for everything. September also ends the summer for home services and starts the year-end run for dental. Seasonality explains more of these charts than any algorithm did.

The helpful content update is the one worth a longer note, because it is site-wide rather than page by page. A pile of near-identical town pages can weigh on the pages you actually care about. If a client bought fifty city pages from somebody in 2019, this quarter is when you say out loud that they are a liability and propose the fix.

Performance Max finished eating the report

The upgrades are done. Local campaigns are gone, Smart Shopping is gone, and what replaced them reports differently.

What disappears from a template built on the old campaign types: campaign names your automated exports referenced, the store visit and location detail Local campaigns gave you, and query data at anything like the old resolution. Asset group insights are not a search terms report and no amount of framing makes them one.

So rebuild the client-facing page around what survived and what the client cares about anyway:

1. Leads and calls, by month, against spend. Cost per lead as the headline number.
2. Lead quality from the client’s own side, which means booked appointments, not form fills. Ask for that number every month until it becomes routine.
3. Listing and map performance next to the ads, because in Performance Max the profile is feeding the campaign and clients should see them together.
4. Assets: what you shot, what you wrote, what you swapped. In a campaign this automated, creative is the work, and the report should show it as work.
5. Account-level negative keyword lists, which still go through a rep. Log the request and the date so the file exists when someone asks why a term showed up.

Check the location setting on every upgraded campaign before you report anything. Presence versus interest has cost more local accounts more money than any other setting in Google Ads, and upgrades are a good moment for it to quietly revert.

The January report is built this quarter

Universal Analytics stops processing data on 1 July next year. That deadline is not the one that matters to your reporting.

The one that matters is the year-over-year comparison a client expects in their January report. A property that starts collecting next spring cannot produce one until the spring after. Every client account should be dual tagged and collecting in Google Analytics 4 now, with conversions defined and matched, so this holiday season exists in the new property when someone asks how it compared.

While you are in there: export the historical Universal Analytics data each client would miss, mark which numbers are allowed to disagree between the two properties, and check your report templates for anything that broke quietly. Search Console’s international targeting report went away last month, which matters to almost no local client and to exactly one slide in some agencies’ decks.

What to stop promising before renewals

Renewal season is when optimistic language from March gets signed for another twelve months.

• A recovery date after a core update. You can commit to the work. Nobody can commit to the next update’s timing or outcome.
• Query-level visibility in Performance Max. Say what you can see and what you cannot, in the proposal, in writing.
• Rank tracking as the headline. Local results vary by the block someone is standing on. Leading with rankings sets up an argument you will lose in month four.
• Numbers that reconcile across platforms. Meta, Google Ads and the client’s CRM will not agree, and after last year’s tracking changes they agree less. Name one system as the source of truth for the invoice conversation.
• A free migration to Google Analytics 4 “sometime next year”. It is real work on a real deadline. Scope it and price it now.

What to do this month

• Put a dated, plain-language note about both search updates in every affected client’s next report, before they ask.
• Audit upgraded Performance Max campaigns for location settings, final URL expansion and asset quality, then rebuild the reporting template around leads and cost per lead.
• Confirm every client property is dual tagged and collecting correctly, so the January comparison exists next year.
• Export the Universal Analytics history each client would want to keep.
• Read your live proposals and renewals for promises about rankings, recovery timelines and query visibility, and change the wording this week.
• Ask each client for booked appointments per month, and start the habit before the holiday rush swallows it.

Nothing here takes long. It just has to happen in October rather than in January, when a client has already drawn their own conclusion. If you resell Google Ads or local search work under your own brand, the reporting language is the part your clients actually experience, and it is the part we tend to fix first for the agencies we do white-label fulfilment for.