The Four Numbers in Our Monday Report

Every brand we have taken over has arrived with a monthly deck nobody read. Forty slides, every metric the platform exports, and no sentence anywhere saying what happened or what we are doing about it. We send four numbers on a Monday morning and a short note. It has never once been the thing a client asked us to change.

One. Spend and what it returned

Money in, revenue attributed, and the ratio between them, for last week and for the four weeks before it. One line. If the ratio moved, the note says why.

Two. Cost per acquisition, by week

Not by day, because daily numbers are noise dressed up as information, and not by month, because by the time a month closes the decision is four weeks old. Weekly is the shortest window that means anything for most consumer accounts.

Three. What the top three ads did

The three ads taking the most spend, with hold rate and cost per acquisition each, and how long each has been running. This is the line that tells you whether you are about to need new creative, usually a fortnight before the overall numbers say so.

Four. What ships this week

How many new concepts are in edit, what is shooting, and what goes live on which day. A report that only looks backwards leaves the client guessing about the part they are actually paying for.

What we leave out

Impressions. Reach. Video plays. Cost per thousand on its own. Engagement rate on a paid ad. Every one of them can be interesting in a specific investigation and none of them belongs in a weekly summary, because they move without anything having happened.

If the four numbers are good, the note is two lines. If one of them is bad, the note explains what changed and what we are doing on Tuesday. That is the entire report, and it takes about eleven minutes to write.