This week we received this question via our Ask Us Anything

I have a client who does PPC marketing. He has all his clients pro-rated to the same day for his monthly service fee deducted from their card. It makes it difficult to graph Gross Income weekly other than monthly, without a crazy spike one week a month. Any suggestions?

Firstly, let’s consider what a statistic is.

It’s a measurement of an actual thing.
A tangible result.

If a sales person made 10 sales, they’d have 10 signed orders.

If a baker baked 10 cakes, you’d be able to see 10 cakes.

If a singer wrote 10 songs, you could see the music sheets and listen to them playing.

The PPC marketing firm bills their clients the same day each month. By graphing this weekly you end up with a spike once a month, like below.

Or, you could graph it weekly by calculating the average using this formula:

Monthly Income x 12 / 52.

This is going to create a flat kind of graph with the same value each week until the following month.

What else can you do?

You have 3 options:

1. Leave it as is, spiking weekly.

2. Use the “Hide the missing value” feature which will create a graph like #2 below.

3. Make it a monthly statistic, which is what it really is.

Unless there is other PPC income received during a different time of the month, then the actual real truthful statistic is monthly and there is no point tracking it weekly.

What can be tracked weekly are things like new clients, new deals, etc. Those, if rising, will reflect in the monthly income graph also rising.

But the fact is, if income is received only once a month, then it is a monthly statistic.

Agree?

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