Dashboards grow because tools are good at adding tiles. Businesses grow when someone is forced to make a weekly decision. I ask founders to keep three numbers on one page, in that order: spend, qualified demand, and close rate.
Everything else is optional. If a chart cannot change a Monday decision, hide it. This is not anti-data. It is anti-decoration. Decoration is how teams spend two hours explaining a week that needed a twelve-minute call.
Spend is an input
Write the money that left the business for demand: ads, boosts, influencers you actually paid, the agency fee if they run media. Do not mix it with salaries and software. You are trying to see whether attention is getting cheaper or more expensive, not whether the company is profitable overall.
Qualified demand is the output you can inspect
A qualified conversion is a human action sales will stand behind: a booked call, a paid order, a lead with the budget and the problem you sell. Form fills are not qualified until someone has looked at them. If you cannot sample ten of this week’s “leads” and say yes, they are not demand. They are a mailing list.
This is where most arguments start. Marketing wants volume. Sales wants people who can buy. The scorecard sides with sales, because salaries are paid in cash, not in CTR. Once the definition is written down, the fight gets shorter.
Close rate tells you whose problem it is
If qualified demand is up and close rate is down, you do not have a media problem. You have a sales, offer, or operations problem. Buying more leads will make the week noisier. If close rate is stable and qualified demand is down, then we look at creative, audience, and the path — the leak essay is the next click.
Think with Google — Data and measurement
The Monday review, twelve minutes
Minute one to three: what did we spend. Minute four to seven: how many qualified conversions, and what did they cost. Minute eight to ten: what closed, and did close rate hold. Minute eleven to twelve: kill, keep, or scale. Then stop talking.
Kill means the test is done. Keep means it earned another week at the same spend. Scale means qualified conversions moved with money and close rate did not fall. If you cannot say which of the three it is, you do not have a scorecard. You have a meeting.
IAB’s measurement standards are a useful filter when a vendor arrives with a new metric. Attention is interesting. Viewability is interesting. Cash is the job. Think with Google’s measurement library is worth skimming for the same reason — and then ignored if it does not serve the three numbers.
What to do this week
Open a sheet. Three columns. Last four weeks. If you cannot fill qualified demand, you do not have a reporting problem. You have a definition problem. Write the definition with whoever closes. Then run the twelve-minute review next Monday. If you want the diagnosis that comes before the scorecard, read the leak essay first.
A Nairobi service brand I sat with had fourteen Looker tiles and one number nobody trusted. We killed the tiles. We wrote: spend, booked consults that sales would ring, and consults that became retainers. Week three, they cut a campaign that “looked good” because qualified demand was flat. That is the job of a scorecard: permission to stop.
If you want a starter page before you bother with a scorecard, build the mock on the SME desk. A business with no path does not need a dashboard. It needs a page that can take a lead.
Also read: Find the leak before you scale the spend