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SOP — Read the strategy readout

Who: Media Buyer · When: weekly, before making any changes to the account Time: 5 minutes per client

What this is for

Knowing what actually carried before deciding what to change. The media buying board shows the funnel and recommends moves; this step is the context that stops a move from being made blind.

A buyer who pauses a high-CPM ad without knowing it carried the best hook is solving the wrong problem. A buyer who scales a low-cost ad without knowing it ran the same angle as three others is buying concentration, not performance.

Steps

  1. Open the client's Media Buying tab. The board shows every campaign with spend in the window, its funnel, and the moves available.
  2. Read the funnel for each campaign. The bottleneck is labelled — it names the single stage whose repair would move cost per result furthest.
  3. Read the plays. Each one states what it expects, where that expectation comes from (arithmetic, SOP, or measured), and what it costs if it fails. A play with no downside stated is a play nobody checked.
  4. Check the hit rates. Plays with measured rates (from past decisions you logged) carry more weight than baselines (from campaign history when nobody intervened). If a play has never been logged, its rate is estimated and says so.
  5. Look at frequency. A campaign above the fatigue threshold is wearing out its audience. No creative fix will help — the audience needs to change.
  6. Decide, then log the decision. The "Log a decision" button freezes the metrics at the time of the decision. Seven days later the system evaluates it automatically.

Judgment calls that stay yours

Whether the bottleneck is the real problem. The funnel identity is arithmetic, not insight. A bad CTR on a brand awareness campaign is not necessarily a problem if the campaign is not optimising for clicks.

When to act versus wait. A campaign live for three days has noisy metrics. The board shows active days — read them before acting on a rate that has had no time to settle.

What good looks like

You can name, for every active client, what carried, what is the binding constraint, and what you would change if you were going to. The readout takes five minutes because the board already did the arithmetic — the buyer supplies the judgment.