The five sections
A report exists to answer one question: should we run this again, and differently how? Everything that does not serve that question is decoration.
Our own reports go out inside 48 to 72 hours and cover impressions, engagements, top creators, and conversion attribution where we can pull it. That is the floor rather than the ceiling, and the sections below are what a full one looks like whoever produced it.
One: the distribution, not the total
Two campaigns report three million impressions. In the first, one creator did 2.4M and nineteen others did the rest. In the second, twenty creators each did between 100k and 250k.
Same headline, completely different products. The first bought a lottery ticket that happened to win, and the honest forecast for next quarter is that it probably will not. The second was produced by a system, and a system runs again.
So the first table in the report is per creator, every name, sorted by reach, including the ones that did nothing.
| Column | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Creator | You approved the list. You should see how each name performed against the reason it was on it. |
| Impressions | The raw reach, per post rather than aggregated. |
| Engagements | Replies and quotes separately from likes. Replies are the ones that move ranking. |
| Engagement rate | A large account with a flat rate is a worse buy than a smaller one with a live audience. |
| Clicks | Per creator, which requires a per-creator link. The scheme is here. |
| Median and top decile | Stated at the bottom, so the shape of the distribution is legible without doing arithmetic. |
A report that gives you totals and withholds the per-creator rows is telling you something. Usually that a small number of placements carried it and the rest were filler, which is a fine outcome to have and a bad one to hide.
Two: the shape over time
Hour by hour for the first 24, then daily to day 7. This is where the mechanics are visible and where you learn whether the campaign was amplified or merely simultaneous.
- Where it peaked. A launch that peaks in hour two and decays has a different problem from one that never gets off the floor.
- Whether the second wave lifted it. The second and third waves exist to carry the tail past the natural first-day decay. If the curve shows no bump where the waves went out, they did not work, and that is worth knowing before you pay for them again.
- The decay rate. The useful comparison is against your own previous launches rather than an industry figure. A slower decay usually means the replies stayed alive, which usually means the claim was arguable.
An average launch through our network lands around 1M views, with strong ones reaching 2 to 5M over 24 to 48 hours, and the shape is a curve across roughly 24 to 30 hours. Anything with a materially different shape has a reason, and the report should name it.
Three: what happened downstream
The section most reports skip, because it requires the client's data and a baseline that somebody had to record in advance.
- Traffic and signups against the trailing two-week average, stated as a lift rather than a raw total.
- Branded search, before and after. The best available proxy for whether people who did not click still heard you.
- Qualified inbound, counted as conversations. Form fills flatter the number and tell you less.
- Follower gain on your own accounts, which is the part you keep and the reason the next launch starts from a higher floor.
- Self-reported attribution, quoted verbatim rather than bucketed.
Confidence stated on each. Reach without conversion is vanity, and a report that presents impressions as the outcome has changed the subject from what you bought.
Four: what underperformed
This is the section that separates a report from a case study, and its absence is the single most reliable signal about who you are working with.
Every campaign has failures. A creator whose post landed flat. An asset that got fewer clicks than the plain text version.
A wave that went out at the wrong hour. A hook that turned out to be less arguable than it looked in the brief.
A report that names three of those, with a view on why, is a report written by people who intend to run the next one better. A report where everything worked was written for the renewal conversation.
Ask for it explicitly in the scope if it is not offered, phrased as: which placements would you not repeat, and why? The answer is more informative than any of the totals.
Five: what changes next time
Three to five specific changes, each tied to something in the four sections above. Not principles, not "continue to optimise the creative", but decisions.
Drop these four creators and add two from this tier. Move the second wave four hours earlier.
Lead with the benchmark rather than the demo, because the posts that carried the benchmark outperformed by a factor of three. Build the landing page a week earlier so the click path is not the constraint.
Each of those is checkable against the next report, which is the only real mechanism for a campaign getting better rather than merely getting repeated.
When to ask for it, and twice
First read at 48 to 72 hours. Early enough that the campaign is still recoverable, the creators are still available, and the team still cares. A report that arrives three weeks later is a historical document.
Second read at day 30. Non-negotiable, and rare. Impressions peak inside 48 hours and nothing else does.
Signups tail for weeks, branded search settles at a level above the old baseline rather than returning to it, and any sales cycle longer than a fortnight has not resolved yet.
The measurement windows are 48 hours, 7 days, 30 days and 90 days, and a single report at the first one measures the spike and misses the part that pays.
Both reads should be in the scope before you sign. The diligence questions cover asking for a redacted example of a real one, which is the fastest way to find out whether any of the above is going to arrive.
Questions we get asked
What should a launch report include?
Five things: the per-creator distribution rather than a total, the shape of the campaign over time, what happened downstream against a pre-launch baseline, what underperformed and why, and what changes next time. Our own reports land inside 48 to 72 hours covering impressions, engagements, top creators and conversion attribution where we can pull it.
Why does the distribution matter more than the total?
Because two campaigns reporting the same total can be entirely different products. Three million from one outlier means you bought a lottery ticket that happened to win. Three million from twenty creators each doing six figures means a system produced it, and a system can be run again next quarter.
When should we get the report?
Twice. A first read inside 48 to 72 hours while the campaign is still recoverable and the team still cares, and a second at day 30, because signups tail for weeks and branded search settles at a new level rather than returning to the old one. A single report at 48 hours measures the spike and misses the part that pays.