Teardown: the weekly influencer report, column by column
Teardowns6 min read
Every Monday the desk sends one sheet per campaign. It has five columns: reach, engagement rate, cost per acquisition, CPM and the next move. Each is a short definition and a rule about what can and cannot be said with it. This is that sheet, taken apart a column at a time.
Why one sheet, every Monday
A weekly report works because it is regular. The same columns in the same order, on the same day, mean the brand reads it in a minute and notices when something changes. A new format each week asks the reader to learn the report before they can read it.
The Monday timing is deliberate. It gives the operator the weekend’s posts in the data, and it gives the brand a full working week to act on the recommendation. A report that arrives on a Friday is read on the following Monday anyway, and the weekend’s posts sit unexamined between the two. The sheet is built to be read in the first hour of the week and acted on before the second.
One sheet per campaign also keeps the numbers honest. Everything on it is counted the same way, week to week, and anything that changes definition is said out loud. A sample of the layout is on /for-brands/sample-sheet, and it carries column names and definitions only.
Reach
The number of accounts that saw a post at least once, as the platform reports it. It is not followers, not impressions and not views, and the sheet never adds follower counts together. Where the platform gives a deduplicated figure across posts, the sheet prints it; where it does not, the cell says so.
Reach answers one question: how many people could have noticed. It does not answer whether they cared, and it should not be the last line of any report. The post at /blog/what-we-count-as-reach explains the four numbers that get called by this word.
Engagement rate
Interactions divided by an audience measure — and the sheet states which measure, because the same post has a different rate depending on whether the divisor is followers or reach. It counts likes, comments, saves and shares as the platform reports them, and says which are included.
It is a signal of attention, not of sales, and it is read against the creator’s own history, not against a general standard. A rate that is high for one account can be ordinary for another. A sudden jump with no explanation is a reason to look at the comments before celebrating.
Cost per acquisition and CPM
Cost per acquisition is the spend divided by the customers the chosen method attributed to it, and it is only as good as that method. The sheet names the method beside the figure: code, link, whitelisted ad or survey. Where no method has reported yet, the cell is blank and says why.
CPM is the cost per thousand impressions, a measure of what exposure cost. It is useful for comparing buys of the same kind and misleading across different ones. A low CPM on content that no one acts on is not a bargain. The two figures sit side by side because each one corrects the other, and the full discussion of methods is in /blog/measuring-influencer-marketing-roi.
The next move
The last column is the only one that is not a measurement. It is the operator’s recommendation for the coming week: continue, change the creative, shift budget, pause, or stop. It is written by the senior operator named on the brief, in one or two sentences, with the reason.
It is the column that makes the sheet a tool and not a record. A report that ends in a number invites the brand to guess; a report that ends in a recommendation invites a decision. It also gives the brand something to disagree with, which is the start of a useful conversation. If the recommendation is to continue unchanged, the sheet says that too, and why. “Nothing changes” is a decision, and it deserves a reason as much as any other.
Marked, never totalled
Two rules apply to every column. A figure that has not been verified is marked as unverified, and not presented as if it were. And figures are never totalled across creators when they are not additive: reach overlaps, rates do not sum, and an average of rates is not a rate.
Where a number is not cleared, the sheet carries the words “Metrics on request” instead of a guess. The practice is the same one that governs the whole site: a visible gap is recoverable, and an invented figure is not. How an agency should run its reporting alongside the rest of its work is on /influencer-marketing-company.
