A report you can finish before your coffee goes cold.

Not a login to a dashboard with forty tabs. One page, every week, in the words you would use yourself: what came in, what it cost, what got changed and what happens next.

Sample

This is the whole thing.

Week 34 · Mon 18 to Sun 24 August

Your week

Sample

Conversations started: 41 +6
Leads with a phone number: 9 +2
Cost per conversation: $1.34 −$0.11
Spent: $212

What changed

Turned off the general “visit our yard” ad. It had spent $34 in two weeks and started three conversations, all of them people asking where you are. Put that budget onto the Bailey ad, which is the one people are actually messaging about.

What I noticed

Six of the nine leads asked about towing weight before anything else. Worth putting the tow weight on every listing, because right now people have to ask and some of them will not bother.

Next week

Writing two more ads in the same shape as the Bailey one, using the two units that came in on Thursday. Nothing else changes.

Sample report. Invented business, invented figures, written to show the shape and the level of detail.

Why it is written like that

Reporting fails in one of two directions. Either it is a platform export, which is accurate and unreadable, or it is a summary with no numbers in it, which is readable and worthless. The useful version has four numbers, the movement on each, and a plain account of the decisions somebody made on your behalf that week.

Four numbers, not forty

Reach and impressions are not decisions. Conversations, leads, what a conversation cost and what was spent are the four that change what anyone would do next. Everything else is available if you want it and is not sent unasked.

The changes, in words

What was turned off, what was turned up, and why. This is the part that says whether anyone is actually looking at the account, and it is the part that no automated report can produce.

Something you did not know

Advertising generates the only honest market research a small business gets: hundreds of people saying, unprompted, what they care about. The pattern in those questions is usually worth more than the week’s leads.

You keep everything. The ad account, the pixel and the data are yours and stay in your name. If this stops being worth it you keep every campaign, every audience and every conversation, and simply stop paying the fee.

Want to see what yours would say?

The Acquisition Review is the first version of this report, written about what you already have running.

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One company. A specialist for each problem.

C.E.A Smith is Richard Smith, working from Blenheim, Marlborough, New Zealand. Each part of the business has its own home so you get the specialist, not a menu.

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