What to review weekly, monthly and quarterly

Half of all bad marketing decisions come from reading a number more often than it can meaningfully change.

Written by the Colleviate Performance desk

Every metric has a natural frequency: the rate at which it can move for a real reason. Reading it faster than that means reading noise, and reading noise produces action, which is how accounts get destabilised by people trying to help.

Weekly: operational

Spend pacing, lead volume, cost per lead, response time on enquiries, anything broken. The test for inclusion is whether the team can do something about it this week. Keep it to a short list and a fifteen-minute meeting.

Monthly: performance

Channel performance, blended efficiency, cost per acquisition by cohort, content and search progress, creative test results. This is where budget moves between channels and where the commentary matters more than the charts, as argued in the dashboard that gets read.

Quarterly: strategy

Share of search and brand indicators, pipeline quality, payback period, whether the diagnosis in the annual plan still holds, and what to stop. The quarterly meeting should be able to change the plan; the monthly one should not.

Never daily

Rankings. Brand search. Conversion rate on low-volume pages. Anything where a single day's variance exceeds a month's trend. If somebody insists on a daily dashboard, give them spend and leads only, because those are the two that can genuinely need same-day attention.

The discipline that makes it work

Write the commentary before the meeting and circulate it. Meetings spent reading numbers aloud produce no decisions. Meetings spent arguing about an interpretation that everybody has already read produce several.