Read the change, not the number

Short answer: a number on its own cannot be read. Revenue of 84,000 is neither good nor bad until you know what it was last month. Most dashboards lead with the absolute figure because it is easy to display, and it is the half of the information that decides nothing.

Why the big number is the wrong one to lead with

Open almost any dashboard and the largest thing on the screen is a total. It feels like the important number because it is the biggest, and it is the one you can do least with.

You cannot act on 84,000. You can act on 84,000 when last month was 61,000, and you can act differently on 84,000 when last month was 96,000. The figure did not change; what you know about it did.

This is not a small framing point. It is the difference between a screen you glance at and a screen you decide from.

What a comparison has to be to mean anything

• The same length of time. Twelve days against a full month is not a comparison. It is the single most common way people accidentally lie to themselves at month end.
• The same kind of period. A month containing a holiday against one that does not will differ for reasons that have nothing to do with your work.
• Measured the same way. If your tracking changed between the two periods, you are measuring the change in measurement. That is why a drop right after a fix is usually the correction, not a decline.

Get those three right and a comparison is evidence. Get any one wrong and it is decoration with a percentage sign.

The three changes worth watching

Not everything deserves a comparison. Three do:

• Money in against money out. Revenue and spend, together. Either alone will mislead you; revenue rising while spend rises faster is a worse month wearing a better number.
• Cost per result. The earliest honest signal that something is drifting, usually visible weeks before revenue reacts.
• The mix. Which channels made up the total. A flat month can hide one channel collapsing and another quietly rescuing it, and you would never see it in the headline.

Where MIQAS comes in

Every figure in MIQAS carries what it was in the previous period, so the change is on the screen rather than something you work out. The comparison is like for like by construction, same length of period, so the most common self-deception is not available to you.

And because the numbers come from your own orders rather than from what each platform claims, two periods are genuinely comparable. Two months measured from whichever dashboard happened to be open are not.

This is on Starter, because reading a change correctly is not an advanced requirement. It is the basic one.

A habit worth ten dashboards

Once a week, write down three numbers and what they were the week before. Revenue, spend, cost per result. Six figures, two minutes.

You will find you stop asking whether the month was good, which has no answer, and start asking what changed and why, which does.

A number tells you where you are. A change tells you where you are going, and only one of those is a decision.