Sending a monthly report

A monthly report is one calendar month of one project, set against the month before it, as a document you can hand to a client or a colleague. Monthly reports, under Reports in the sidebar, lists the month in progress and the 12 full months before it. Each opens as a page and downloads as a PDF.

What it holds

• A summary of the month’s headline figures, one for each instrument the project has.
• Organic search: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and position from Search Console, with the month’s top queries and pages.
• Traffic and revenue from Google Analytics’ organic channel.
• Position tracking: visibility, how many keywords sit in each band of positions, and the biggest gains and losses.
• Site health from the month’s latest crawl, with its top issues.
• Backlinks from the link profile fetched that month.
• AI visibility from the month’s latest complete sweep.
• The posts your store published that month, with their search clicks.
• Where to grow next: the most valuable open rows of the worklist.

An instrument the project has not set up is one sentence saying so. It is never drawn as zeros.

How a month is compared

Search Console, Google Analytics and the rank tracker are compared with the month before, and only when both months were wholly measured. A crawl, a link profile and an AI sweep are compared with the latest one before the month, whichever month it fell in, and the report names its date beside the change. If Search Console holds only part of a month, because it was connected mid-month or stopped syncing, the report gives the figures for the days it has, names those days, and states no change. The month in progress is never compared, because a partial month set against a full one makes every figure look like a fall.

A crawl, a rank check, a link profile or an AI sweep belongs to the month it was made in. When none was made that month, the report says so and shows the latest one before it, dated, rather than presenting it as the month’s. The worklist keeps no history, so its section is the list as it stands on the day the report is made, and says so.

Signing it

The branding form on the same screen sets a company name, printed as “Prepared by” at the top of every report, a logo (a PNG or JPEG of at most 200 KB) and an accent colour for the report’s rules. Branding belongs to the workspace, so every project’s report carries it. Each report also carries “Made with Rankgap”; a paid plan can hide it, and the pricing table says which.

The PDF

Download PDF renders the same page into a PDF on our side, with the project, the month and the page number in the footer of every page. A workspace can render 30 PDFs a day. The page’s own Print or save as PDF button works at any time and counts against nothing.