An agency that shows its work

You see the account as it is, not as it was at the end of last month. That matters most in the two weeks a monthly cadence cannot see: a campaign that started drifting on the 3rd is three weeks of spend by the time a month-end report notices, and the report will describe it as a bad month rather than a late catch.

It also changes what a report is for. When the numbers are always visible, the monthly conversation stops being a reveal and becomes a decision.

A change log that says a budget went from £40 to £55 tells you nothing. The useful record is what was expected to happen, what the evidence was, and what happened next — because that is the only version you can hold anyone to, and the only version that teaches you anything the second time.

There is a specific reason to insist on this. An advertiser-initiated change that nobody recorded when it happened can never be separated out afterwards: the outcome series maps many histories onto one line, so an unlogged change is a permanent confounder. Not a hard one to untangle later — impossible. Which is why the log is written before the change, not after it.

Both Google and Meta report a column called Conversions, and it means different things depending on account settings and where you are looking. Google separates all conversions from the primary subset its bidding optimises toward; Meta breaks them out by action type. Comparing two figures labelled the same without checking whether they count the same thing is a routine, easy error.

So a Riibon number is reconciled against something measured outside the platform — bookings, payments, whatever the actual outcome is — and where the two disagree, the report says so and by how much. A figure that only exists inside the ad platform is labelled as one.

Modelled conversions are labelled as modelled. Where tracking coverage is partial, the report says what it could not see rather than presenting a subtotal as a total. A month that went badly is reported as a month that went badly, with the cause named and its own series printed beside it.

None of this is generosity. An agency selling measurement rigour cannot round its own numbers and expect the rest of its claims to survive.