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Now, on to the playbook...

I often hear you guys tell me you built the tracker and then never opened it again.

You set it up on a Sunday. You filled it in once.

Then the month got busy, and it's been sitting in a tab ever since.

I get it.

Most marketing reports are built to look thorough, but thorough takes hours.

And nobody has that kind of time.

The report we use and introduced to our accelerator clients has a single job:

Tell you what to fix next in ten minutes.

That's it.

We know from experience that a report that takes longer won't survive a busy month, and a report you don't run isn't even worth doing.

Most marketing reports are built to be read, not acted on

For a long time the reports landing in my inbox looked like this:

• Follower growth
• Total views
• Likes and comments
• Engagement rate

Don't get me wrong. Those numbers matter at the top of the funnel.

They tell you whether your content is reaching anyone at all. And that's worth knowing.

But they don't tell you what your priorities should be for Monday.

Engagement rate is a good example of this.

We stopped tracking it, because you can run one account through five engagement scoring tools and get five different percentages... And not one of them correlates to a profile or website visit.

So we're looking for fewer numbers, sitting side by side on a spreadsheet, that tell you what you should work on next.

Our report is seven simple numbers in one row

Step 1: Fill in one row on the first of the month.

I recommend tracking the numbers, in the order a guest moves through your demand engine:

1. Impressions
2. Profile visits
3. Link taps
4. Website visits
5. Booking engine visits
6. Adds to cart
7. Bookings

The first three come from the Instagram app on your phone.

The next three come from Google Analytics, and the last one comes from your PMS.

Updating this should take no more than 10 minutes, once a month.

(We don't use Meta Business Suite because we've seen link tap numbers come back hundreds or thousands off from what the app reports for the same period.)

Step 2: Read the row left to right and stop at the first "cliff".

You're looking for one thing:

The cliff, a.k.a. the first place the numbers fall off hard.

For example, 400,000 impressions and 50 profile visits means the content performed but didn't reach the right audience.

Another example: Strong profile visits but flat link taps means they got to you, but your bio didn't give them a good enough reason to leave Instagram.

Whichever cliff you hit first is the ONE thing worth working on this month.

Everything downstream of it can wait.

Step 3: Fix one thing, then leave the rest alone.

Change four things at once and you learn nothing about any of them.

So one change, one month, then a new row underneath the last one.

If you're starting from zero, get the website, booking engine and PMS working first so you can take at least take a booking.

Then ask guests how they heard about you, because the sooner it runs the more history you'll have when you need it.

The data comes after that.

What one row is actually worth

Here's the math that pays for those ten minutes minutes:

A 1% improvement in booking engine conversion, on 10,000 monthly website visitors at a $1,000 ADR, is $100,000 in additional direct revenue a year.

That's just 1% on a single stage of the flow.

We've watched that play out at Onera.

​CartStack, our abandoned cart tool, recovered $200,000 across both properties in the trailing twelve months.

That's an expense of a few hundred dollars a month, pointed at a single stage of the funnel.

Nobody rebuilt anything to get there.

The spreadsheet just told us which stage was leaking cash, so we went and fixed it.

Takeaway: A simple, actionable report beats a comprehensive dashboard you won't even open

An effective report should tell you what to fix next and flag issues early enough that you still have a month to fix it.

So this week, open a blank spreadsheet and put down one row with last month's seven numbers.

You don't need a year of history to start.

You just need that one row, and one stage of your funnel to work on.

Ben Wolff
Founder, Oasi & Modern Hospitality Accelerator

P.S. If the first cliff in your row is either impressions or profile visits, you have a content problem, and it's the one Brian and I are tackling live this Thursday.

In that session, we're pulling apart the single-shot Reel. This is the format we lean on when we need volume without booking a shoot day.

You'll build your next one with us on the call.

Topics come from conversations you're already having, you shoot the footage on your phone, and you edit it in minutes.

Plus everyone who joins live gets the Copywriter GPT we trained on hundreds of our own Reels.

Thursday, September 3, 1:00 PM ET, free. Save your seat here.​