Wicked Reports

Every platform grades its own homework. Decisions, not dashboards. We turn first-party data into decisions, not dashboards.

Wicked Reports shows ecommerce brands the verified new-customer cost behind every channel - the truth your ad platforms won't. Wicked Reports shows ecommerce brands the verified new-customer cost behind every paid channel - the truth your ad platforms won't.

10/20/2026

The channel with the worst-looking numbers this week is the one growing our best customers. Here’s the chart that shows it.

A new YouTube customer is worth $87 the day they buy. Thirty days later they’re worth $239. A year later, $266 — roughly triple, and most of it happens in the first month.

Now look at how YouTube reads on a normal week-one report: slow to convert, expensive per new customer, soft ROAS. Judge it on the first seven days - the way most people judge every channel - and it’s the first thing you’d cut.

And you’d be cutting the channel whose customers grow faster than anyone else’s.

The reason is simple once you see it. Search closes demand that already exists, so its money shows up fast. Video goes and finds people who’ve never heard of you — they come in small and grow, and the revenue lands around day 25, not day 2. Same seven-day clock, completely different channels.

Look at the orange line against the other two. Google and Meta crawl sideways. YouTube nearly triples.

If you’re about to cut a channel this week because the first week looked bad, check what a new customer from it is worth at 30 days first. That’s the number that tells you whether to cut it or be patient — and most people never look at it.

Get it every Monday, no pitch - http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81760

10/14/2026

“Performance is off. What’s going on?”

That’s a question Jason Smith, founder of Spotlight Social Advertising, asks about his clients most mornings. He’s connected the Wicked Reports MCP to Claude, so he asks in plain English and gets answers from verified, click-level attribution data instead of platform dashboards.

Behind every answer, Ask Wicked agents do the attribution work based on the goals you set :

→ After a budget change, they know which metrics to reassess and which to leave alone
→ When returns slip, they check whether spend piled onto one creative while other good ideas never got a chance
→ If you haven’t set goals yet, they ask first, so the analysis matches what you’re actually trying to achieve

Every platform grades its own homework. Ask Wicked answers from your real clicks and real orders.

Jason shared his workflow with our founder Scott Desgrosseilliers on The Truth About Social Ads.

Watch the clip below. Full episode - http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81742.

10/13/2026

The first full week of Q4 came in quiet - and a quiet week is the best time to take a clean reading before the ramp.

Across hundreds of brands, Meta held at $78 per new customer with 92% verified first-time buyers, its strongest quality profile on record, and an 8% markup that means the number is almost all real growth. Google held at $163. Click prices haven’t started climbing. The baseline is intact.

The exception is Microsoft, and it’s instructive. Its verified new-customer cost has risen four weeks straight, up 22% to $207, while its new-buyer share slipped. Yet on a last-click dashboard it looks like it’s improving - its last-click over-credit hit a series high the same week its verified cost peaked.

Same channel, two reports, opposite directions. Only one is pricing new customers.

That combination - getting more expensive at growth while looking better on ROAS - is how a line item earns budget it no longer deserves.

The move: if you recorded your Q4 baseline, confirm it held. If not, this is the last quiet week to do it.

Full issue 👉 http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81745

10/07/2026

When is the best time to buy Meta clicks in Q4? The sooner, the better, and 2025 put a number on it.

ROAS on October Meta clicks rose from 0.82 in October to 1.40 by year end. A 70% lift, landing entirely after the month the click was paid for.

BFCM clicks closed their four day window at 0.85, then kept settling: 1.07 by mid December, 1.18 by year end. A 0.85 reading during the sale weekend is on pace, not a failure.

Every click window carries a settle multiplier, the gap between its in-window reading and where it lands by December 31. October clicks carried 1.71x. BFCM clicks carried 1.38x.

Read the other way, the multiplier is a warning about December. Clicks bought late in the month have almost no runway left in the year to settle, so what you see is close to all you get. Early December and Holiday clicks never reached break even, at 0.96 and 0.88.

Every platform grades its own homework, and it closes the books before these curves finish. Judge Q4 on the settled view, not the in-window snapshot.

Every settle curve from Q4 2025, free. Free download 👉http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81739

10/06/2026

A Meta click cost $1.09 in October 2025.

On BFCM weekend the same click cost $1.62. A 49% premium at the peak.

A 49% price hike sounds like a reason to pull back. But CPC only tells you what you paid to get the click. It says nothing about what the click returned.

And on the return side, BFCM behaves very differently from its price tag. BFCM delivered the lowest settled first-month CAC of any window in Q4, settling to $179 as delayed conversions landed. That is the promos doing the work. People take the deal, so a lot of them convert fast and pull the cost down.

Here is the catch. A low CAC on day one of a promo tells you people took the deal. It does not tell you the spend was profitable. That depends on what those customers do next, which is exactly what most attribution windows never see.

So do not judge the BFCM premium on CPC alone, and do not judge it on the four day snapshot. Pair the cost with the settled nCAC and nLTV that land in the weeks after. Priced that way, the BFCM click can earn its premium. It just does it after BFCM, not during.

The full CPC, CAC, nCAC and nLTV curves, free.

Free download 👉 http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81739

09/30/2026

New customers from October Meta clicks were worth $222 by the end of October.

By December 31, the same customers were worth $333.

That is $112 of new customer value that landed after the month the click was paid for. A 7 day cookie sees none of it. A 30 day window sees a fraction.

Here is the detail most attribution misses. Those October customers averaged a $167 first order but $222 of value inside October alone.

They were already repeat buying in their first month. Q4's best customers do not just convert. They come back fast.

Every platform grades its own homework, and it closes the books before this value shows up.

We tied every Meta click from Q4 2025 to the purchases it produced through year end, with new versus repeat verified at the order level, across hundreds of ecommerce accounts. Nine planning points, one chart each.

Free download - http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81718

09/28/2026

Everyone spent September watching the holiday. The real story was Meta and it's about to cost people money in their Q4 plans.

Across hundreds of brands, Meta's cost to acquire a new customer dropped every single week of the month making it 13% cheaper in four weeks. And it stayed that way while 90%+ of the customers it brought in were brand new, so these are real new customers, not repeat buyers making the number look good.

Isn't that just the holiday? No. Two of those four drops happened after the holiday ended and other channels bounced back. A holiday discount reverses. This kept falling.

Here's why it matters this week. Black Friday budgets are being locked right now, and most are built on Meta's summer numbers. Those numbers are 13% out of date.

If your plan still uses them, you may be pacing too cautiously at a price you'd happily pay for new customers.

This week's Paid Traffic Truth has the full month 👉 http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81711

09/25/2026

This week taught us a lot about what's coming in November. 👀

Here's the short version. Over the two Labor Day weeks, the holiday didn't make everything cheaper or everything pricier. It split your channels. Discovery (like Meta) got cheaper as people browsed and bought off their feeds. Search got more expensive as the buyers who'd normally look you up got caught by an ad first.

And the reports mostly missed it, because the numbers weren't finished converting yet and last-click gave the credit to the wrong channel.

Why it matters right now - Labor Day was basically a practice run. Black Friday and Cyber Monday do the same thing, just way bigger and way faster.

So over the next few weeks, we'll be digging into BFCM properly, what really happens to your numbers in the biggest week of the year, and how to read them before you move money you can't get back.

This week's full breakdown http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81685
Lots more coming. 🦃

09/21/2026

Everyone spent September watching Meta and Google fight over the holiday. The biggest move of the week happened somewhere almost nobody was looking - the channel most brands gave up on measuring.

YouTube.

Why did nobody notice? Because a YouTube ad gets watched on a TV, the click comes days later from a phone, and last-click reporting gives the whole sale to whatever the person searched at the end. YouTube gets zero credit, looks dead, gets cut.

This week, measured against actual orders, it was one of the most efficient channels on the board.

One caveat we'll be honest about - it's a single week, and some of it is the holiday unwinding. So it's a "watch this" not a "bet on this."

This week's Paid Traffic Truth breaks it down 👉 http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/81685

09/16/2026

It's the season to accidentally cut a channel that was working fine. 😬

Here's the trap. During the holidays your reports get distorted two ways at once. The clicks from this week haven't all converted yet, so your numbers are unfinished. And the holiday shifts where your buyers show up, so one channel can look broken when it's just the calendar. Same report, two lies.

Most teams make budget calls off that report anyway, because it looks final and the meeting's already booked.

That's exactly what Wicked Reports is built to stop. It shows you where every number is actually heading once conversions catch up, and it verifies what a new customer truly costs on each channel instead of trusting the platforms to grade themselves.

So you stop reacting to holiday noise and start deciding on what really happened.

We just watched this pattern run for two straight weeks in verified data. Have a look at it live in your own account before setting your Q4 budget - https://www.wickedreports.com/demos

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