Update
A units contract on every tool result — micros, ratios and RPM stop being guesswork
TL;DR
The most expensive class of reporting bug isn't a wrong query — it's a right query whose units were misread. A cost in micros presented as dollars is off by a million; a ratio presented as a percentage is off by a hundred. Every tool result now carries an explicit units declaration at the point it's produced.
What shipped
- One vocabulary covering money (micros, nanos, decimal), rates (0-1 versus percent), RPM per thousand, durations in seconds, average position, and compact date forms.
- Attached at the two tool-result boundaries, so anything downstream — a report, a dashboard, an alert — reads the declared unit rather than guessing from the magnitude of the value.
- Declared, never inferred. The contract restates what each producing module already documents; it does not look at a number and guess what it might be. A value that happens to be small is not evidence it's a ratio.
- An alert chip on completed reports, so a report generated while an alert was firing says so.
Why inference was never an option
Guessing units from values is the kind of shortcut that works in testing and fails in production: a cost of 0.85 could be 85 cents or a ratio, and the only way to be sure is for the module that fetched it to say. Different platforms genuinely disagree here — the same metric name means a ratio in one API and a percentage in another — so the declaration has to come from the producer, not from a heuristic downstream.
Frequently asked questions
- What problem does a units contract solve?
- Ad platforms return money in micros, nanos or decimals, and rates as either a 0-1 ratio or a percentage. Reading the wrong one produces numbers wrong by a factor of a hundred or a million, from a query that was otherwise perfectly correct.
- Are units inferred from the values?
- No, deliberately. The contract restates what the producing module already documents. Guessing from magnitude is unreliable — a small number could equally be a ratio or a genuinely small amount of money.