If an agency reports fast, it is not because the account managers are fast. It is because they are not designing. The layout was decided once, by someone with time to decide it well, and every report since then has reused it.
This is how templates work in Screebl, what to put in them, and the one rule that keeps old reports safe.
What a template is
A template (we call it a dashboard template) is a grid of rows. Each row holds one or more blocks: KPI tiles, charts, tables, text, a creatives slider, a map. Blocks have a size, a position, and a type. They do not hold data; the data comes later, per report.
Think of it as the deck’s master slide, except the charts are real and update themselves.
What belongs in a good campaign template
The templates that survive contact with real clients share a shape.
Row 1: four KPI tiles. A volume metric, a rate, an efficiency metric and an outcome. Each tile shows the value, the change versus the previous period and a trend arrow. Clients read this row and nothing else on a busy day.
Row 2: one trend chart, full width. Impressions or spend as bars, the rate as a line, by date. This is where the story of the month is visible at a glance.
Row 3: two split charts. Rate or cost by channel and by creative, as ranked bars or a donut for share of total.
Row 4: a table. Dimension plus up to six metrics for the long tail. Nobody reads a table top to bottom; they look things up in it.
Row 5: text. Commentary. Keep a block for it so the account manager cannot forget it.
Optional rows: a creatives slider showing the ads that ran, with laptop or phone frames; a map with pins for location-based campaigns.
Resist the urge to add more. A template with fifteen charts produces reports nobody finishes.
Building it
The template builder is drag and drop. Add a row, add blocks to it, set each block’s width so the row fills the grid, name the blocks so the filler can suggest sensible metrics later, and save. You can preview it with sample data before any report uses it.
Give templates names that describe the service line, not the client: “Display campaign — weekly”, “Social always-on — monthly”. You will reuse them across clients.
Reports are made from templates
Creating a report is: pick the client’s campaign, pick the template, name it. The report inherits the layout and waits for data. You fill it by uploading the campaign export and assigning metrics per row, or by typing into a block by hand, or both.
Twenty clients on the same service line can share one template. When the layout improves, new reports get the improvement. Old reports do not, and that is deliberate.
The one rule: templates lock when reports use them
The moment a report is created from a template, the template is locked. You can still view it and build new templates from it, but you cannot edit it in place.
This protects the report you sent last month. If a colleague could reorder the rows of a template in October, September’s report, which the client has bookmarked, would change shape. Locking makes “the report the client saw” a stable thing.
When you want a new layout, duplicate the template, edit the copy, and use the copy for new reports. Old reports keep the old template; new ones get the new one.
Themes
Each template has a theme: the accent colour used by charts and tiles. The theme is applied to the dashboard only, never to your agency’s own interface, so trying a new colour on a template does not repaint the app for everyone.
Match the theme to the brand that will sit on the header. Agency-branded reports use the agency colour; client-branded reports often look better in the client’s.
Workflow summary
- Build one template per service line. Five rows, not fifteen.
- Create reports from it per client and per period.
- Fill from the export; add commentary by hand.
- Publish; the client’s portal and link update.
- Improve the layout by duplicating the template, never by editing a locked one.
Agencies that follow this get their monthly reporting down to minutes per client. The time saved is not the point; the point is that the account manager spends it on the commentary, which is the part the client is paying for.
