Your advertising platforms can claim more sales between them than the business received. Your team can then spend six hours building a report that gets four minutes of discussion, leaving little time to decide what needs to change.
What Did We Get For The Spend? is a free Door4 session on Wednesday 7 October 2026 at Crow Wood Hotel & Spa. We’ll help you build one measurement framework, turn it into a KPI hierarchy that fits on a board slide and use AI to reduce the reporting legwork.
Each advertising platform measures performance using its own attribution rules. Several platforms can claim credit for the same customer, so adding their reported conversions together gives you a total that bears little relation to the sales recorded by the business.
Cometly says combined platform totals often reach 150% or more of actual sales. This doesn’t mean the platforms are broken. It means you need a shared measurement framework before their numbers can support a commercial decision.
The volume of data creates another problem. Door4 Founder and Director Leon Calverley sees reporting decks filled with figures that were easy to generate but difficult to use.
“Excel makes it easy to generate levers, ratios, targets… numbers which are produced and often forgotten,” says Leon. When activity fills the report, the relationship between marketing spend and business performance becomes harder to see.
“I’ve seen reports that run dozens of lines, thousands of cells. We are showing marketers how to trim this down, into a hierarchy that makes sense to them. A model that they can defend in a boardroom.” – Leon Calverley
A board slide should show how marketing contributes to the business objective, where performance has changed, and what action follows. Click-through rate, bounce rate and pages per visit may help an analyst investigate performance, but they don’t all belong in the main conversation.
As Leon says: “Your board don’t care about click-through rate.” He has seen technical founders and owner-managers dig into micro-metrics until those figures consume time that should go into commercial decisions.
The session will show you how to organise measurement into a hierarchy. Business outcomes sit at the top, supported by the marketing and channel measures that explain movement underneath. The hierarchy also needs to show where further growth starts costing more money, so the board can see the point at which extra spend produces a weaker return.
Sean Dwyer will take attendees through the decisions involved in cutting a report down. His starting point is usually the same: “Almost always too many KPIs. Struggling to see the wood for the trees.”
You’ll leave with a structure you can apply to your own reporting. It will connect the board slide to the more detailed analysis behind it, without asking senior colleagues to work through thousands of cells first.
AI can handle parts of the collection, checking and summarising process once you have decided which measures matter. It can’t decide what your business is trying to achieve, repair weak source data or make an overloaded report commercially useful.
The time saving matters because reporting already takes up a large share of marketing work. PHD’s global survey found that time spent on reporting tasks had increased by 57% over ten years. Less manual work gives your team more time to investigate changes and decide how to respond.
Sean has spent three hours a week producing a client report in the past, only to learn the recipient didn’t look at any of it. He still sees reports trigger long discussions about red or amber KPIs, only for the meeting to conclude that no action can be taken because the business has no activity connected to that measure.
“My biggest bug bear for too many years is the creation of reports that either get no attention or far too much – it cuts both ways.” – Sean Dwyer
We’ll examine how AI can do more of the reporting legwork while your measurement framework controls the output. As Sean says, “AI will be a great tool, but crap inputs lead to crap outputs.”
Bring your current reporting questions and a sense of which business objective your marketing is meant to support. We’ll work through the framework, KPI hierarchy and AI reporting process during the morning.
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“I’ve seen reports that run dozens of lines, thousands of cells. We are showing marketers how to trim this down, into a hierarchy that makes sense to them. A model that they can defend in a boardroom.” – Leon Calverley
“The easiest thing to do is create an outlook of everything, and report on everything – doing this costs time and money – so as with anything make sure the ROI is worth that investment.” – Sean Dwyer