Agencies spend an enormous amount of time on reporting. A 2025 HubSpot survey found 67% of agency owners identify reporting as their single biggest operational time sink — more than campaign strategy, more than creative production, more than new business. And yet client satisfaction with reporting hasn’t moved much in years, and in some measures is quietly getting worse. That gap is worth sitting with, because it suggests a lot of that effort is going somewhere clients don’t actually value.
The data on what’s actually happening
Farinella’s 2025 survey of 138 marketing leaders — CMOs, directors, managers with real budgets — put the average agency satisfaction score at 7.89 out of 10. Only 13 of the 138 respondents gave their agency a perfect 10. Most scores clustered in the 7–8 range: not bad, but nowhere near great. Perhaps more telling, 23% of respondents said they weren’t confident their current agency was the right long-term partner — and as the survey’s authors note, those are just the ones willing to admit it.
A separately cited industry figure puts the number even more starkly: 42.86% of clients in the digital marketing industry report being unsatisfied with their agency’s reporting specifically. And Retently’s 2026 NPS benchmark shows the digital marketing agency industry sitting at a score of 49 — down from 51 the year before. Solid, but trending the wrong direction, not the right one.
What’s notable in the Farinella data is what clients said was actually driving the dissatisfaction. In their own words, clients weren’t frustrated by creative quality or campaign execution. They were frustrated when they didn’t know what was working, why it mattered, or what came next. Communication happens; clarity often doesn’t.
The mismatch, made concrete
Two data points from Improvado’s guide to white label marketing reports illustrate the underlying problem better than any survey score. First, 80% of clients need the same 15 core metrics, even if they phrase their requests differently. Second, agencies save 38+ hours per analyst per week by automating data pipelines instead of manually exporting, cleaning, and reconciling platform reports. Put together, a large share of the reporting workload is repetitive assembly of the same numbers — work that adds little a client can’t already see on a dashboard.
That’s a structural pattern, not a one-off. A huge share of the reporting effort agencies pour into detailed platform-level metrics — the screenshots, the channel-by-channel breakdowns, the raw exportable data — sits at exactly the intersection of “takes the most time” and “clients care about the least.” Meanwhile, the interpretation clients actually want — what does this mean, what’s the competitive context, what should we do next — is often the part that gets the least dedicated time, because it’s harder to automate and doesn’t feel like “the report” in the traditional sense.
What clients say they actually value instead
This is where the picture gets genuinely useful for repositioning an agency’s value, rather than just fixing report formatting. The IPA and Tracksuit’s 2026 “Bridging the Gap” report surveyed 200 senior client-side decision-makers, with budgets ranging from £1 million to £250 million, on what they actually value in an agency relationship.
Quality of output. Strategic expertise. Specialist knowledge. None of the top-ranked factors in that survey are “comprehensive reporting” — which doesn’t mean reporting doesn’t matter, but it does suggest that reporting’s real job is to demonstrate the strategic thinking and expertise clients are actually paying for, not to exist as a deliverable in its own right. A beautifully formatted 40-slide deck full of screenshots proves neither. A tight page that says “here’s what happened, here’s why, here’s what we’re doing about it, and here’s where we sit against competitors” proves both, in far less time to produce and far less time for a client to sit through.
Why this matters more than it used to
The retention math has gotten sharper. Retainer-based agencies lose roughly 18% of clients annually versus 42% for project-based work, according to a 2026 Focus Digital analysis — and given that acquiring a new client costs anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one (a widely cited Harvard Business Review estimate), the numbers behind getting reporting right are not small. A 5% improvement in retention has been estimated to lift agency profits by 25–95%, per Bain & Company’s long-standing research on the topic.
There’s also a quieter shift underway that changes the calculus further: AI-assisted reporting tools are now genuinely good at the mechanical layer — anomaly detection, first-draft summaries, automated data pulls across platforms. That means the “raw data compilation” work that used to justify hours of an account manager’s time is becoming commoditized fast. What’s left as the actual differentiator is exactly the part the data says clients already valued most: judgment, interpretation, and a point of view on what to do next. Agencies that keep pouring their best hours into the part that’s about to be automated, instead of the part that was always the actual value, are optimizing for the wrong side of that shift.
| What agencies typically spend the most time on | What clients say they actually value most |
|---|---|
| Platform-by-platform screenshots and raw metrics | Competitive context and interpretation |
| Comprehensive, exhaustive data coverage | Clear point of view on what to do next |
| Consistent template formatting | Strategic and specialist expertise |
Sources: Improvado, White Label Marketing Reports guide (2026); IPA/Tracksuit “Bridging the Gap,” 2026
None of this is an argument against reporting. It’s an argument against mistaking reporting volume for reporting value — and against agencies continuing to pour their scarcest resource, senior time, into the parts of the job that clients have never actually said they cared about most.
Further reading: Swydo’s 2026 guide to marketing reporting and the IPA/Tracksuit “Bridging the Gap” agency value research.