Quarterly Marketing Review Template
A Pre-Read, a Ninety-Minute Agenda and a Decision Log
Short answer
A quarterly marketing review should end in decisions, not slides. Use a six-part pre-read: scorecard against targets, planned versus shipped, a verdict on each bet, what competitors changed, a check of the strategy, and proposed decisions. Then run a ninety-minute meeting that produces stop, start and continue decisions with named owners.
1. What is a quarterly marketing review for?
Weekly and monthly reports keep the plan running. The quarterly review decides whether the plan, and occasionally the strategy, should change. If nothing is decided, it was a status meeting.
A quarter is long enough for a channel, a campaign or a message to show a real result, and short enough that a wrong bet has not yet cost the year. That makes it the natural point to stop, start or change things. Weekly reports are too noisy for that, and annual planning is too late.
The review has three questions to answer. Did we do what we planned? Did it work against the targets we set? And has anything changed in the market that makes the plan, or the strategy behind it, wrong? The third question is the one most reviews skip, because it requires looking outside your own dashboards.
2. What goes in the quarterly review pre-read?
Six sections on no more than four pages: the scorecard, planned versus shipped, bet verdicts, market changes, a strategy check and proposed decisions. It goes out two working days before the meeting so the meeting is spent deciding.
| Section | What it contains | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Scorecard | Three to five measures, each with target, actual, last quarter and same quarter last year | One table |
| 2. Planned vs shipped | What the plan said would happen, what did, and why the gaps happened | Half a page |
| 3. Bet verdicts | Each campaign or experiment with its hypothesis, result and a proposed keep, change or stop | One row per bet |
| 4. Market changes | What competitors changed this quarter: pricing, positioning, ads, new entrants, review themes | Half a page, dated |
| 5. Strategy check | Each row of the strategy page marked still true, weakened, or wrong, with the evidence | One table |
| 6. Proposed decisions | Stop, start and continue proposals for next quarter, with owners and capacity | Half a page |
| Measure | Target | Actual | Last quarter | Same quarter last year | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Closest-to-revenue measure] | [Ahead / on track / behind] | ||||
| [Main pipeline measure] | |||||
| [Channel measure 1] | |||||
| [Channel measure 2] |
| Bet | Hypothesis we wrote at the start | Result | Proposed verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Campaign, channel or experiment] | [If we do X, Y will happen] | [What happened, with numbers] | [Keep / change / stop] | [One sentence] |
3. How should the ninety-minute meeting run?
Spend the first half hour on what happened, the second on what changed outside, and the last on decisions. Nobody presents the pre-read; everyone has read it, and the time goes on disagreements.
A ninety-minute agenda for the whole team, or for the founder and whoever owns marketing.
- Scorecard questions only (15 minutes). Go straight to questions about section 1. Where a measure is behind, agree on whether the cause is execution, a wrong target or something outside your control. Do not solve it yet.
- Bet verdicts (20 minutes). Walk the bet table row by row and confirm or overturn each proposed verdict. The rule: a bet that missed its hypothesis twice is stopped unless someone can name what will be different next time.
- Market changes (20 minutes). Review what competitors changed and ask one question per item: does this affect a decision we have already made? Most items will not. The one or two that do move to the strategy check.
- Strategy check (15 minutes). Go through each row of the strategy page. Anything marked weakened or wrong gets an owner and a date for a proposed rewrite, not a rewrite in the room.
- Decisions (20 minutes). Agree the stop, start and continue list with owners, then check it against capacity. If the starts exceed the hours available, something on the continue list becomes a stop.Every start needs a matching stop or a named source of new hours. That single rule prevents most overloaded quarters.
4. What does a finished quarterly review look like?
Here is the decision log from a Q3 review at an invented five-person booking tool for small physio clinics, competing with Veltrix. The market section changed one decision; the rest came from their own numbers.
| Measure | Target | Actual | Last quarter | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New paying clinics | 30 | 26 | 22 | Behind target, growing |
| Demo bookings | 80 | 94 | 71 | Ahead |
| Trial to paid | 35% | 28% | 33% | Behind, and falling |
| Facebook group referrals | 15 | 19 | 9 | Ahead |
| Decision | Type | Reason | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stop the webinar series | Stop | Two quarters below its hypothesis, no clear fix | Co-founder B |
| Rewrite trial onboarding around client list import | Start | Trial to paid falling; trials that import a client list convert far better | Co-founder A |
| Add a price objection answer against Veltrix's $33 entry plan | Start | Market change: Veltrix cut its entry plan from $39 to $33 in August, pushed it in Meta ads, and demo calls started citing it | Co-founder B |
| Keep Facebook group participation at current hours | Continue | Ahead of target at steady effort | Co-founder B |
| Strategy row 2 (the alternative) flagged as weakened | Strategy check | Veltrix now appears in lost deals, not only the paper diary. Rewrite proposal due in three weeks | Co-founder A |
The pattern is typical. Most decisions come from internal numbers, and one or two come from the market. But the market decision here, a price objection answer, would have been missed without section 4, and it explains part of the trial-to-paid drop that the internal numbers alone could not.
5. How do I fill the market changes section without a research week?
Keep a running log during the quarter instead of reconstructing it at the end. Note each competitor pricing change, repositioned page, new ad angle and review theme with the date, then pick the few that touch a decision.
Reconstructing a quarter of competitor activity in the week before the review is where this section usually dies. Ad libraries show what is live now, not what ran two months ago, and landing pages that changed in July look normal in September. A dated log kept as things happen is the only reliable source.
What to log for each direct competitor during the quarter:
- Pricing page changes, with the before and after.
- Homepage and landing page headline changes.
- New ad angles on Meta and Google, and ads that have run for weeks (they are working for them).
- New themes in their public reviews, positive or negative.
- Launches, new segments or new channels.
This is the part Oppira automates. It tracks competitor posts, ads, landing pages and reviews continuously, sends Monday insight cards, and can email a plain-language report on a monthly schedule, so the quarter's market section is three monthly reports to skim rather than a research project. The playbook's change history also shows every strategy edit you accepted during the quarter, with the signal behind it, which fills section 5 almost on its own.
Key Takeaways
The review exists to decide
If the meeting ends without stop, start and continue decisions with owners, it was a status meeting.
Six-section pre-read, sent two days ahead
Scorecard, planned versus shipped, bet verdicts, market changes, strategy check and proposed decisions. Nobody presents it.
Compare with the same quarter last year
Quarter-on-quarter comparisons mix in seasonality. The year-ago column shows whether a change is real.
Stop bets that missed twice
A bet that missed its hypothesis two quarters running stops unless someone can say what will be different.
Every start needs a stop
Check decisions against capacity. New work without released hours is how quarters get overloaded.
Log the market as it happens
Competitor changes cannot be reconstructed reliably at quarter end. A dated running log fills the market section.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources
- [GA4] Change and compare date ranges in reports Google Analytics Help, September 2026.Official documentation for comparing a date range with an earlier period in GA4 reports.
- Default channel group Google Analytics Help, September 2026.How GA4 groups traffic into channels, which keeps channel measures comparable quarter to quarter.
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