We redacted one of our reports. Here's every page, explained.

A lot of agencies hide behind dashboards. You get a login, a colourful interface, 18 widgets, and no idea which numbers matter. The dashboard exists so the agency can say "everything is in the platform" when you ask what they did.

We don't run that way. Every Bonehead client gets a PDF report at the end of their billing month. Six pages. Designed to be read once, in 5 minutes, on a phone or laptop. Then you get on with tattooing.

Here's what's on every page, why it's there, and what the numbers actually mean. The example numbers below are anonymised and rounded — your results will vary based on city, style, season, and budget.

Page 1: Cover

The cover does three jobs:

• Names the client (artist or studio)
• States the period covered (e.g. "April 6 to May 4, 2026")
• Sets the tone of the document with the Bonehead brand and a clean background

That's it. No "executive summary." No "performance highlights." You'll see all that in 90 seconds when you turn the page.

The period is always the client's billing month, not the calendar month. If your subscription renews on the 6th, your report covers the 6th to the 5th of the next month. Keeps the timing honest — no part-month included or chopped off.

Page 2: Headline stats

The page most clients look at first, and the one that answers "what did the money do this month?"

The four numbers on this page:

1. Messaging conversations started. The closest proxy to bookings we can report on. This is people who clicked the ad and sent you a DM as a result.
2. Reach. Unique people who saw your ads at least once. Useful for awareness context, not for booking decisions.
3. Profile visits. People who tapped through from the ad to your Instagram or Facebook profile to look around.
4. New followers (organic + paid). Growth in the period. Helpful but not the main metric.

What a typical month might look like at a NZ$549 management fee + NZ$500 to NZ$700 ad spend:

Messaging conversations: ~60 to 90
Reach: ~25,000 to 45,000 people
Profile visits: ~700 to 1,400
New followers: ~80 to 150

Big disclaimer: those ranges are illustrative, not promised. A fineline artist in Sydney on $30/day will see very different numbers from a traditional artist in regional NZ on $15/day. Style, city, budget, season, and creative all swing it.

You won't see cost-per-message or CPM on this page. We don't include those in reports. They invite over-comparison with other agencies' reports run on different campaign types, and they distract from the deliverables.

Page 3: Period comparison

A bar-chart comparison of this period vs the previous period. Same length, same metrics. So if you ran ads in March and again in April, page 3 shows April's headline stats next to March's, side by side.

This is the page that turns numbers into a trend. One month of data can look fine in isolation and be a problem in context. Or it can look soft on its own and actually be the strongest month yet.

What you'll typically see:

• Messaging conversations: usually up or down by 10 to 30% month-over-month. Anything bigger gets called out.
• Reach: depends on whether we expanded the audience or held it tight.
• Profile visits: tracks closely with reach but with creative quality as a multiplier.

If a number dropped, we explain why on the recommendations page. We don't bury dips or pretend they didn't happen. We also don't catastrophise them. Most month-to-month dips are creative fatigue, audience saturation, or seasonal.

Page 4: Top ads and creative analysis

The visual page. The 3 to 5 best-performing ads of the period, shown as actual ad creatives with their stats underneath.

What you learn from this page:

• Which images are pulling the most attention right now
• Which style of post (action shot vs healed work vs portrait of you working) is doing the heavy lifting
• Whether video or static is winning for the month
• Which copy hooks are landing

This is also where we flag creative fatigue. If the top ad has been running for 5 weeks and its click-through rate is dropping, we name that and recommend a refresh. If a newer creative just overtook the old champion, we name that too and suggest leaning into it.

This page is the most useful one for artists who want to feed better content back into their posting calendar. The work that performs in ads usually performs organically too. Worth paying attention to.

Page 5: Audience breakdown

Where your ads are landing and who's responding. Three things on this page:

1. Age and gender split. Of the people who saw your ads and engaged, what age range and gender split. Helps inform creative direction (gender-matching creative tends to perform better, see our earlier articles).
2. Geographic split. Which suburbs or regions within your targeted area are responding most. Sometimes this surprises clients — a suburb you didn't expect generates the most DMs.
3. Platform split. Instagram vs Facebook engagement. Most tattoo accounts run 80%+ Instagram, but some niches and demographics skew Facebook more than people think.

This page is mostly diagnostic. We use it to decide whether to widen, tighten, or shift the targeting next month. You don't need to do anything with it — but if you're curious where your audience is actually coming from, it's all there.

Page 6: Recommendations and next steps

The page that matters most after page 2. The closing page of every report says:

1. What we're doing next month. Creative refreshes, audience adjustments, budget shifts. Specific and concrete.
2. Anything that needs your input. Photos we need, decisions about pricing or services, ideas we want to test.
3. A heads-up on platform changes. Anything happening on Meta, Instagram, or the broader industry that might affect your campaign next month. Pulled from our monthly research notes.

This is the part Tom writes by hand for every client every month. It's not generated. It's not a template. It's specific to where the campaign is at and what should happen next.

Why we use PDFs, not dashboards

A few reasons:

• You read it once. A dashboard is a tool that nags you. A PDF is a document that respects your time. Artists already have a million tabs open.
• It travels. Forward it to your studio owner, your accountant, your business partner. Save it for tax. Put it in a folder. Dashboards lock the data behind a login.
• It freezes a moment in time. Dashboards refresh constantly. A report from March still reflects March's reality six months later. You can compare your April-2026 to your April-2027 properly.
• It forces us to think. Writing a report each month means we have to actually look at the campaign, not just leave it running in the dashboard. The act of writing the recommendations page is the work.

If you ever want raw Ads Manager access, just ask. We'll set you up with view permissions. We've never had a client take us up on it after the first month, but the option's there.

What we don't include in reports

A few things on purpose:

• Specific cost-per metrics. No CPC, no CPM, no cost-per-conversation. These vary wildly by city and style, and seeing them in isolation usually leads to bad decisions.
• Industry benchmarks. "Your CPC is below industry average" is the kind of line we don't write. Industry averages are made up. We'll tell you whether your CPC is reasonable for your area, not whether it beats a fake benchmark.
• Predictions. We don't promise "next month you'll get X DMs." We hedge on next-month performance because the second we don't, we're setting an expectation we can't control.
• Vanity stats. Likes, comments, impressions. They get measured for our own internal use, but we don't crowd the report with them. They don't book tattoos.

The honest part

The numbers in this article are illustrative ranges. We don't promise the numbers in our example reports — yours will vary based on your city, style, budget, season, and a dozen other factors.

What we do promise is the structure. Every client gets the same six pages, every billing month, written by hand. If you ever want a sample (real numbers redacted), drop us a DM and we'll send one over.

Reports are how we stay accountable. They're the document that says "this is what the money did, this is what's next." If we're not doing our job, the report makes it obvious — and that's the point.