A UA quarterly business review template that holds up

A UA quarterly business review template built two years ago assumes a quarter that behaves like the ones before it: spend goes up or down, channel mix shifts a little, and the main job of the deck is explaining ROAS movement. That assumption held reasonably well through most of the platform's recent history, which is exactly why so few teams have rebuilt the template from scratch and why the gap between what the deck covers and what leadership actually needs to know has widened unnoticed. Q1 and Q2 2025 have not behaved like that. A single quarter brought an antitrust ruling against Google's ad tech business, a contempt finding against Apple that opened the door to web checkout, DMA fines against two of the largest platforms in the stack, and an M&A rebound that touched several vendors UA teams depend on directly. A QBR template with no section for any of that isn't merely incomplete; it actively misleads whoever reads it into thinking the quarter was calmer than it was.

Why the standard template is out of date

Most legacy QBR decks organise everything around spend and performance: budget by channel, blended CPI, ROAS by cohort, creative refresh cadence. That structure assumes the main variable a UA team controls is its own execution. It has no place to record that a platform's legal or regulatory position shifted underneath the numbers. So a quarter where performance dipped because of a ruling, or because of a policy change, or because a vendor changed hands, gets explained in the same execution-focused language as a quarter where the team simply ran out of good creative. Those are different problems. They need different responses, and a deck that can't tell them apart will keep prescribing the wrong fix.

The five sections a 2025 QBR needs

• Performance as usual: spend, blended and channel-level ROAS, CPI, retention by cohort. This section does not change from the legacy template.
• Platform and vendor risk log: every material ruling, fine, ownership change or policy shift that touched a channel the team buys on this quarter, dated, with a one-line note on what it means for spend allocation. As this column covered in "Games Industry M&A Rebound 2025: What Q1's Deals Signal," a vendor's ownership change is exactly the kind of event that belongs here rather than nowhere.
• Concentration exposure: the percentage of total spend sitting on the single largest channel or network, tracked quarter over quarter, so a leadership team can see concentration risk building before it becomes a crisis.
• Attribution confidence: a plain-language note on where measurement is solid, where it is degraded, and where a new flow (a web shop link, a new attribution framework) has not yet accumulated enough data to trust fully.
• Forward risk watch: known events on the calendar for the next quarter, court dates, expected policy changes, earnings calls for major vendors, so the next QBR is not the first time leadership hears about something already visible today.

A worked example section

A hypothetical mid-size studio spending $2 million a quarter across four channels might present its concentration exposure section like this: 45% of spend on one ad network, up from 38% the previous quarter, with the increase driven by that network's improving performance rather than a deliberate diversification decision. Flagged alongside it, a one-line note referencing the vendor risk log: a short-seller report named that network's parent company earlier in the quarter, and the matter remains unresolved as of the QBR date. Together, those two facts tell leadership something neither number tells alone. Performance is genuinely improving, and the improvement is currently concentrated in a single relationship worth monitoring, not diversifying away from reflexively.

Presenting platform risk without alarmism

The temptation once a risk log section exists is to fill it with every headline from the quarter, which trains leadership to tune the section out. The discipline that keeps it useful is including only items with a plausible line to spend or measurement, or to vendor continuity, and stating clearly when the team is tracking an item that hasn't yet required any action. As argued in "UA Budget Planning for a Season of Platform Risk," the point of surfacing platform risk in a regular report is to normalise discussing it calmly on a fixed cadence, rather than only discussing it in a panic the week something breaks.

Who should own each new section

A common failure mode once a risk log section exists on paper is nobody being clearly responsible for populating it, so it either goes stale or gets filled reactively the week before the review by whoever remembers a headline from the quarter. The workable ownership split gives the media buying lead responsibility for the concentration exposure and attribution confidence sections, since those numbers live in campaign and measurement tooling the buying team already checks weekly, and gives whoever tracks industry news, often the same person who reads vendor earnings calls and regulatory filings, ownership of the platform and vendor risk log and the forward risk watch. Neither section then depends on one person remembering to check a source they don't normally monitor.

Making the template stick

A new section in a QBR deck only survives if it gets used the first time something in it actually matters. That means the person building the deck should populate the risk log every quarter regardless of whether anything dramatic happened, so that an empty quarter looks like an empty quarter rather than like a missing section. The next ruling, the next fine, the next ownership change: none of these is a hypothetical the way it might have been eighteen months ago. Treating the risk log as a permanent fixture rather than a reaction to this particular quarter is what makes the template hold up when the market moves again.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• A UA Budget Planning Template Built for a Flat Market
• MENA and Turkey: a growth market with quirks