Multi-Platform Weekly Performance Index Feasibility Study — Honest Kill of the Headline Acquisition-Cost Metric
Finish the feasibility study with an honest publish/don't-publish verdict for every metric on the proposed scorecard — before any number ships to anyone.
What was getting in the way.
"Give us one weekly scorecard that compares all our ad platforms" is a universally-asked and universally-botched request. The honest answer is almost always "the metric you want doesn't exist in these exports" — but very few scorecards get killed before publication. More commonly, a composite number ships, somebody notices it doesn't tie to any source, and the dashboard loses trust forever.
Context
Universal — applies wherever an AI agent is asked to compose a composite metric from exports whose definitions don't line up.
How the work runs.
- 01
Trigger
a stakeholder asks for a weekly cross-platform performance index.
- 02
Inventory the sources
catalog every platform export's schemas, coverage, dedupe rules, currency handling, and restatement behavior — not just what columns exist, but how they're calculated.
- 03
Prototype the week-over-week pass
build a working prototype of the whole pipeline; every scan is dry-run costed before execution so the feasibility study doesn't itself cost production dollars.
- 04
Grade each metric for cross-platform honesty
for every proposed metric, state whether it exists in every export, whether the denominators are comparable, and whether any single platform's definition would silently dominate the composite.
- 05
Kill what can't be honest
say so publicly before anyone publishes — including the headline metric everyone wanted — and name the narrow proxies that can be published honestly in its place.
- 06
Outcome
a feasibility report with a short list of publishable metrics, a short list of killed ones, and the proxies that take the dead headline's place.
Evidence from the workflow.
Each system has a role.
Intake
Ad platform APIs (search / social / shopping / etc.)
Action (prototype)
Data warehouse
Signal (budget guard)
Scheduled dry-run cost estimator
Why this is Operator.
Owns a workflow end to end, running the process inside the authority you set.
- 01
Feasibility study output is advisory; no production dashboard is published from a study that killed its own headline. Every kill call is accompanied by the exact test that failed, so a future stakeholder can re-run it against new data without re-opening the whole study.
Impact / Outcomes
Three rate metrics qualified as cross-platform publishable across all four platforms in scope.
The headline acquisition-cost metric everyone wanted exists in no platform export — killed in the feasibility report before any dashboard shipped.
Two narrow proxies named as defensible substitutes, with the limits of each stated in writing.
Prototype's scans were every dry-run costed before execution — zero surprise cloud bills from the feasibility work itself.
Find where a workflow like this fits.
Start with the systems, work, constraints, and authority already present in your operation.