KO calculates numbers from your data. The conclusions drawn from those numbers, however, depend on the business behind them: a drop in leads in August is normal for a seasonal project and a reason to investigate for a non-seasonal one. Context is where you say which one you are.
The section has two blocks. KO applies the first one already; the second one is only stored for now — and the section says so in a line above it.
What you see here
The “How to analyse this project” block — four settings that change the output.
- Project mode — what matters right now: growing volume, squeezing out efficiency, keeping customers, or fixing measurement first. The mode decides which cards come first in the What to do now section: in growth mode opportunities rise to the top, in measurement mode broken data does.
- Demand seasonality — none · weekly · monthly · quarterly · annual. The stronger the seasonality, the more cautious KO is about conclusions drawn from short spans: the difference between two weeks means something else for a seasonal project than for a flat one.
- What to compare against — where the norm comes from: the project’s own history, industry benchmarks, or a manual estimate. The project’s own history is the most reliable source.
- Priority regions — the cities and regions you are paying for. KO matches them against the
names of your ad campaigns, so write them the way they are named in the campaigns, not the
way they appear on a map:
Helsinki, not “the city of Helsinki”.
On the right — “KO measured this itself”. The sales cycle and the amount of accumulated data are calculated from your own stream and cannot be typed in. Your estimate of the sales cycle lives in the brief — a gap between “we said 30 days” and “54 measured” is a useful fact in itself.
The “Project brief” block — short questions in three groups. Product: what you sell, the type of business, the average order value, the expected sales cycle, the key step, whether there are repeat sales. Customer: who buys and who decides, where demand comes from, what stops people from buying, what advertising is not allowed to do. Team: who runs the ads and who works the leads, where the CRM lives, what counts as success for the coming quarter.
Set it up for your question
You do not have to fill the whole section in one sitting. In order of payoff:
- Project mode — one minute, and the order of decisions becomes yours rather than generic.
- Priority regions — without them KO cannot tell you that budget is going where demand is not: there is nothing to compare against, and the card simply never appears.
- Seasonality and the source of the norm — they do not change which conclusions appear, but they change how confidently KO states them.
- The brief — one group at a time, whenever you have a moment. Each group has its own save button.
How to read it
A change applies retroactively. Switching the mode or the seasonality rebuilds the output across the whole history of the project — this is a setting for how the data is read, not a period filter. Report numbers do not change: what changes is the order of the decisions and the confidence behind them.
An honest answer can lower confidence, and that is correct. By default a project sits on the most convenient values: no seasonality, the norm taken from its own history. Answer “annual seasonality” and “a manual estimate”, and the confidence of some conclusions will drop. That is not a fault: until you answered, KO assumed ideal conditions simply because nobody had corrected it.
Nothing reads the brief yet. The answers are stored, but no calculation relies on them — KO will start relying on them once context analysis ships. Filling them in now is still worth it, so that the context is already there by then instead of starting from a blank page.
If nothing changed
- The decisions kept their old order — the output is rebuilt on a schedule. Press “Refresh analysis” in the What to do now section to see the result at once.
- The card about budget and regions still never appeared — the region you typed does not
occur in the campaign names. Check how it is written in
utm_campaignand repeat that spelling. - The section will not save — writing requires the project manager role; any participant can read the context.
Related
- The What to do now section — the first and, for now, the main consumer of the context.
- How a report works — the numbers these settings do not touch: they change the conclusions, not the arithmetic.
- The metric catalog — where you define what success looks like as a number.