Marketing Performance Review
Know What's Working
Every channel has a number attached. Almost nobody has checked if it's the right one. Ad spend, retainers, tools, they get renewed because they were renewed last quarter, not because someone re-checked whether they're earning their keep.
The upside is usually reallocation, not addition
Most reviews find at least one channel that's been quietly underperforming for months and one that's been starved of budget it deserves. Moving money between the two often outperforms adding new spend entirely.
That reallocation is the entire opportunity, no new budget required to capture it.
Share of reviews recommending a change to this category.
Budgets are under more scrutiny than they used to be
Marketing spend that once got approved on faith now gets asked to show its work, every cycle.
| Signal | What's shifted |
|---|---|
| Budget approval | Increasingly tied to demonstrated return, not historical precedent |
| Tool sprawl | Average marketing stack keeps adding subscriptions few teams fully audit |
| Attribution expectations | Leadership increasingly expects a single defensible number, not six conflicting ones |
A second opinion nobody's incentivized to give you
Your ad platform will always say your ads are working. Your SEO vendor will always say SEO needs more time. Someone needs to look across all of it with no channel to protect.
Target state after the fix is applied.
What we fix regularly
The shape of change this engagement targets
Every plan targets a specific, named metric off a real baseline, not "more of everything."
Illustrative shape, not a guaranteed outcome.
Ready to set the baseline your plan will target?
Nothing gets promised until we've measured your account.
Three situations we see most often
CMO heading into a budget cycle
Heading into a budget cycle blind, Needs a defensible, independent read before defending next year's numbers upward.
Five channels, five different scorecards, Nobody can put paid, SEO, and social on the same footing to compare them honestly.
A channel “feels” like it's working, No one has checked whether that feeling is backed by revenue.
Founder still approving marketing spend directly
No marketing leader yet, Approving spend directly and needs someone to sanity-check what the team is asking for.
Agency renewal coming up, Wants an independent view before signing another year with the same vendor.
Budget doubled, results didn't, Spend increased significantly last year and the founder isn't confident it was worth it.
Portfolio company under new ownership
New ownership wants a clean baseline, Needs an outside, unbiased view of existing marketing spend before making any changes.
Portfolio-wide standardization, Wants the same review framework applied consistently across several portfolio companies.
Due diligence on a target company, Needs a fast, credible read on whether the target's marketing spend is efficient.
Marketing Performance Review in practice
Ondrel was spending across five channels with five different reporting standards, heading into a budget renewa…
Dravick's marketing team suspected a legacy retargeting campaign was coasting on old momentum but had no inde…
Unreviewed spend doesn't fail loudly, it just quietly underperforms
Nothing about a coasting channel looks urgent from month to month. Reviewed annually, or never, that's a lot of accumulated inefficiency hiding in plain sight.
| Time waited | What typically happens |
|---|---|
| 1 quarter | A single underperforming line item costs a manageable amount |
| 1 year | The same line item has cost several times more, unnoticed, inside a bigger budget |
| Multiple years | Reallocating becomes harder, teams and habits have built up around the current split |
Choose how far you want this taken
Every tier starts with the same honest diagnosis, the difference is how much of the follow-through you want us to carry.
Marketing Performance Review: Diagnostic
The audit itself: what's wrong, and why.
- Pull every channel onto one scorecard
- Stress-test the top three assumptions
Marketing Performance Review: Diagnostic + Roadmap
The full audit, plus a sequenced plan your team can execute.
- Pull every channel onto one scorecard
- Stress-test the top three assumptions
- Call it plainly
- Package it for the room you're walking into
Marketing Performance Review: Done-For-You
We diagnose it, plan it, and implement it ourselves.
- Pull every channel onto one scorecard
- Stress-test the top three assumptions
- Call it plainly
- Package it for the room you're walking into
- We implement every fix ourselves, not just hand you the list
- A follow-up check-in once changes are live
Before you book a call
No, this is an independent review, not a takeover. Most clients keep their existing vendors and use our findings to manage them better.
Read access to ad accounts, analytics, and the last 6–12 months of spend and results data across channels.
A performance review is specifically about spend versus outcome across the whole budget. Our other audits go deeper on one channel at a time.