---
name: run-a-quarterly-business-review
description: >-
  The strategic reset that questions what monthly reviews assume: quarter-over-quarter and
  year-over-year performance with an annual-trajectory verdict, a retrospective on the quarter's
  improvement sprints, validation of goals/structure/channel-mix/measurement-stack against current
  business reality, a quarterly-trend competitive read, and a next-quarter roadmap with revised
  targets, compiled into a stakeholder-ready document via Sheets export. VigilDog produces every
  data table (including MCC roll-ups and PMax channel splits); goal-setting, constraint selection,
  and stakeholder alignment are irreducibly human. Run in the first two weeks of a quarter or
  after major business pivots. Not the operational monthly pass
  (run-a-monthly-performance-review) or weekly triage (run-a-weekly-performance-review), if the
  session drifts into campaign-level tweaking, it has become the wrong meeting.
---
# Quarterly Business Review

## Purpose
Monthly reviews keep the engine running smoothly; the QBR asks whether the engine points the right
direction. Over ~2-3 hours it validates the goals themselves, judges whether account structure and
channel mix still serve the strategy, retrospects honestly on what the team chose to work on, and
commits the next quarter to explicit targets, one binding constraint, and a testing roadmap that
stakeholders have signed.

## When to run
- First two weeks of each new quarter, covering the prior full quarter.
- After a major business pivot: new product line, pricing overhaul, market entry/exit.
- During annual planning, as the data backbone.
- When stakeholders request a strategic reassessment with evidence.

## When NOT to run
- Routine monthly calibration, run-a-monthly-performance-review.
- A single urgent problem (tracking break, bid meltdown), the specific skill, immediately; the
  QBR is scheduled strategy, not incident response.
- Fewer than ~3 months of history on the account, establish baselines via monthly reviews first.

## Prerequisites
- The quarter's three monthly review documents (the QBR consumes their outputs, not raw data).
- Backend business data for the quarter (CRM revenue, margins, capacity constraints), user-supplied.
- Current stakeholder goals, the previous QBR document if one exists, and the
  improvement-initiative history for the quarter.
- Booked stakeholder availability for the alignment step, a QBR without stakeholders is a
  monthly review with extra steps.

## Procedure
1. Quarterly performance (~30 min). Build three tables with `gads_get_account_performance` and
   `gads_run_gaql_query`: this quarter vs last quarter; this quarter vs same quarter last year;
   and YTD vs annual target with a projected year-end at current pace. Metrics throughout:
   conversions, conversion value (revenue or gross profit where cart data exists), CPA,
   ROAS/POAS, spend. Multi-account setups roll up via `gads_get_cross_account_performance`.
   Projection off annual target by more than ~15% → flag for goal revision in step 3.
2. Sprint retrospective (~inside phase 1 time). For each improvement initiative run this quarter:
   target metric before/after (VigilDog pulls the numbers via GAQL), and a verdict, resolved,
   improved, stalled. HUMAN STEP: judge whether the team worked on the actual bottleneck, name
   the quarter's biggest win and miss, and mark recurring constraints (recurrence signals a
   structural issue, not an execution gap).
3. Strategy and structure validation (~45 min).
   - Goals: HUMAN STEP, walk the assumptions with the user: growth still realistic, efficiency
     targets still right, business model or market changed, stakeholder priorities moved. Any
     "yes" becomes a documented goal revision.
   - Structure: `gads_list_campaigns` with quarterly spend/conversions per campaign; flag
     candidates for consolidation (under ~90 conversions for the quarter), segments grown big
     enough to deserve dedicated campaigns, and orphaned entities running without oversight.
   - Channel mix: build the allocation table (brand search / non-brand search / Shopping / PMax /
     display / video) with spend share, conversions, CPA/ROAS, and trend vs prior quarter, via
     `gads_run_gaql_query`; split PMax by surface with `gads_get_pmax_channel_performance` so
     PMax does not hide its channel mix. HUMAN STEP: judge whether each channel earns its share
     and what untested channels merit a slot.
   - Measurement/tooling stack: confirm conversion tracking basis, attribution, offline imports,
     enhanced conversions still fit the business; note platform features shipped this quarter
     worth testing.
4. Competitive and market assessment (~30 min). `gads_get_auction_insights` at account and
   top-campaign level for the quarter vs prior quarter: own IS trajectory, entrants/exits,
   CPC-pressure correlation, judged on three-month trends, never single-month snapshots. HUMAN
   STEP: layer on market context VigilDog cannot see (pricing moves, demand shifts, regulation)
   and decide where response is warranted vs normal churn.
5. Next-quarter plan (~30 min). HUMAN-led, VigilDog-supported:
   - Confirm or revise each KPI target with rationale.
   - Select the single binding constraint for the quarter (from the retrospective and backlog),
     with its metric, current value, and target value.
   - Build the testing roadmap: hypothesis, metric, month, priority per experiment.
   - Budget proposal if the ceiling needs moving.
6. Compile and align. Assemble the QBR document, performance summary, retrospective,
   strategy changes, competitive picture, next-quarter plan, and export the data tables with
   `sheets_export_report` for the stakeholder deck. HUMAN STEP: present, capture decisions and
   open items, and obtain explicit sign-off on targets, constraint, and budget. Structural
   changes agreed here are executed afterward through their own skills with the standard
   preview → approval → commit gate; the QBR itself writes nothing to the account.

## Decision rules
- Quarterly verdicts come from quarterly trends: no strategic response to any single-month blip
  that the quarter smooths out.
- Year-end projection >15% off target → goal revision conversation is mandatory, not optional.
- Consolidation bar: under ~30 conversions/month (≈90/quarter) a campaign is data-starved for
  Smart Bidding, consolidate unless a strategic reason justifies the split.
- Channel-mix scrutiny is proportional to spend share: a channel holding 30% of budget with
  bottom-quartile efficiency is automatically a top-3 agenda item.
- Recurring constraint two quarters running → stop re-running the same sprint; change the
  structure that keeps producing the constraint.
- Time-box ~3 hours. Inputs are the monthly reviews; re-deriving the quarter from raw data means
  the monthly cadence failed, fix that instead.
- No stakeholder sign-off = QBR not done; unratified targets are wishes.

## Common failure modes
- The QBR degenerates into a long monthly review, campaign minutiae crowd out the goal and
  structure questions that only this meeting asks.
- Goals inherited unexamined quarter after quarter until targets and reality fully decouple.
- Retrospective skipped ("we know what we did"), patterns like recurring constraints only
  surface in writing.
- PMax treated as one line, hiding a channel-mix shift inside the black box, always pull the
  surface split.
- No documented output or a document nobody signs; either way, next quarter starts from memory.

## Related skills
- Fed by: run-a-monthly-performance-review (three of them), run-a-weekly-performance-review
  (transitively), analyze-auction-insights (competitive inputs).
- Routes decisions to: allocate-budget-across-campaigns and scale-bids-and-budgets (mix and
  budget changes), review-and-optimize-campaign-structure (consolidations/splits),
  select-a-bidding-strategy and calculate-bid-targets (target revisions),
  set-up-offline-conversion-tracking / set-up-cart-data-and-profit-tracking (measurement-stack
  gaps found in the tooling review).