✳ Performance ·
The honest marketing report
Vanity metrics keep agencies employed
Impressions are up! Reach is up! Engagement is up! None of these pay your rent. Reports built on them are designed to make the agency unfireable, not to make the client richer.
The honest version starts with the number the business actually feels: qualified leads, trials, sales, whatever the money metric is. Everything else exists to explain that number's movement.
The one-page weekly format
One page, four blocks. The money metric and its trend. What we changed this week and why. What worked and what died — with the numbers that prove it. What we're changing next week.
The 'what died' block is the trust engine. Clients don't leave because something failed; they leave because they found out late. Reporting your own failures first makes you the most credible voice in the room.
Set kill criteria in advance
Every experiment gets a kill number before it launches: 'if cost per lead is above X after Y spend, it dies.' Deciding in advance removes the sunk-cost debates and makes the weekly meeting fifteen minutes long.
It also makes creative braver. When everyone knows the downside is capped and pre-agreed, you can afford to test the weird idea — which is usually the one that works.
