Why we make you wait two weeks

The most common piece of feedback we get in the first week is that nothing is happening. A client's POS is connected, posts are going out, and the report says the baseline is still building. Fourteen days feels like a long time to sell someone on patience.

Here's what those two weeks are for.

A café is not a flat line

Take any small business and plot sales by hour for a month. You don't get noise around an average. You get a shape: a morning peak, a lunch peak, a dead patch at three, Saturday behaving nothing like Tuesday, and the first of the month behaving nothing like the twenty-eighth.

If you ignore that shape and simply compare the four hours after a post against the daily average, you will credit every Saturday post with the Saturday rush. The post could have been a picture of the floor and the number would still look good. That's the failure mode of most “social ROI” dashboards, and it's why owners stopped believing them.

What the baseline actually holds

Numal builds a picture per business, per weekday, per hour band. Fourteen days is the shortest window that gives each weekday two observations, which is the minimum for noticing that a shop's Tuesday differs from its Thursday.

It isn't enough to be certain. It's enough to stop making the obvious mistake, and we'd rather be honest about which of those we're offering.

What we do with an unusual baseline period

Sometimes the baseline period contains something abnormal — a holiday, a road closure, a broken espresso machine. The report flags days that sit far outside the rest and lets you exclude them, with a note in the report saying you did. The exclusion is visible to the business owner too. A number the client can't see the workings of is exactly the thing we set out to replace.