What we refuse to call a result
Impressions, clicks and reach explain why something happened. They are not what happened. On the difference between activity and outcomes.
Samuel left the first comment on our launch post, and it deserves more than a comment thread. Reporting, he wrote, should distinguish activity completed from outcomes achieved.
He is right. The distinction is worth an article, because so much marketing reporting is built to blur it.
The two columns
Every marketing report has two columns in it somewhere, labelled or not. What we did. What it changed.
The first is activity. Impressions, clicks, reach, the number of pieces published, the number of hours spent. Easy to count. Entirely within an agency’s control.
The second is outcomes. Enquiries, customers, revenue, and the enquiries that turned out to be worth answering. Slower to arrive, harder to attribute, and the only part of the ledger that pays for the rest.
Activity is comfortable. Outcomes are honest. The temptation to swap one for the other grows with the gap between them.
What we report
Our reports open with the outcome line. What the work changed, in the language a finance director would use. When a channel did not move a customer, the report says so in the first line rather than the last.
Activity appears where it earns its place. Clicks matter when they explain a fall in enquiries. Impressions matter when they explain a rise in them. They are the diagnosis, not the verdict.
What we refuse to call a result
Reach. Engagement. Impressions. Followers. Sentiment. Traffic on its own. These are signals and directions. Useful to the people doing the work, nearly meaningless to the people paying for it.
We will show you every one of them. We will not present any of them as achievement.
The test is simple. Would this number survive being read aloud in a board meeting by someone whose reputation depends on it being true? Numbers that survive are results. The rest are notes.
Why agencies report activity anyway
Because it is the part they control. Outcomes depend on your market, your offer, your pricing and a hundred other things no agency can command. Activity can always be produced on schedule, and a report full of it will always look busy.
That is an explanation, not a defence. The client is not buying a schedule. They are buying a change.
The reporting we sell
We built the measurement side of this business for exactly this reason. Analytics you can trust, dashboards humans can read, and reporting that separates the two columns without being asked. It is not the most glamorous service we offer. It is the one all the others stand on. If that is the part of the conversation you want to have first, our analytics and Looker Studio pages set out how we think about it.
Samuel asked a fair question in our first week. It seemed only right to answer it at length.
The activity was one comment. The outcome was this article.