Ecommerce & Retail · Growth problem
Agency underperformance
When results disappoint, it's tempting to conclude an agency isn't performing — but in businesses running several specialist agencies alongside an in-house team, the more common finding is that each agency is doing reasonably well against its own narrow metric, while no one holds the combined commercial view across all of them. That distinction matters considerably for what happens next.
Symptoms
What this usually looks like
- Each agency reports good performance against their own KPIs, but overall commercial results are disappointing
- It's unclear who is accountable for overall revenue and contribution margin, as opposed to channel-level metrics
- Agencies occasionally give conflicting recommendations or blame each other's channel for poor results
- Similar work (reporting, testing, content) is being duplicated across agencies without anyone noticing
- Strategic decisions get made by whichever agency has the most recent, most positive-looking report
Diagnostic questions
What we would test first
- Compare overall contribution margin trend against each agency's headline reported metric over the same period
- Reconcile summed agency-reported results against finance-confirmed revenue to check for overlap
- Review recent instances of conflicting agency recommendations and how (or whether) they were resolved
- Audit recent activity across agencies for duplicated tests, content, or technical changes
- Identify who, if anyone, currently owns the combined cross-channel commercial view
- Rule out non-marketing constraints (stock, pricing, product) as a contributing or primary factor
Root causes
Why it happens
- 01
Channel silos with no shared commercial owner
Where paid media, SEO, and CRM are each run by a different specialist agency, each is naturally incentivised and measured against its own channel metric, and none is positioned or resourced to make trade-off decisions across channels in the business's overall interest.
- 02
Agency-owned metrics used as the performance standard
When the metrics used to judge an agency's performance are the same ones the agency itself reports and has influence over how they're framed, there's an inherent tension that makes it hard to get an objective read on whether the work is genuinely delivering commercial value.
- 03
Unclear accountability for overall commercial outcomes
If no single person or function inside the business owns the combined view of contribution margin and growth across all channels, poor overall performance has nowhere clear to be diagnosed, and each agency can reasonably point to its own good channel-level numbers.
- 04
Duplicated or conflicting work across agencies
Without a shared prioritisation process, agencies can end up running overlapping tests, producing similar content, or making conflicting technical changes to the same pages, wasting budget and creating confounded results that are hard to interpret.
- 05
Weak commercial prioritisation from the client side
Agencies generally deliver against the brief and priorities they're given; if the business itself hasn't clearly prioritised where commercial value is most likely to come from, agencies will reasonably default to optimising what's easiest to measure within their own channel.
- 06
The underlying issue may not be agency performance at all
In a genuine minority of cases, the real constraint is stock availability, product pricing, category economics, or an internal decision-making bottleneck that no agency, however good, could resolve — worth ruling out before agency performance itself is the focus of the review.
Evidence
The numbers we would look at
These are the metrics that make the constraint visible, and the cuts that stop them being reassuring by accident.
| Metric | What it tells you | How we read it |
|---|---|---|
| Overall contribution margin growth vs each agency's reported channel metric | Tests whether channel-level 'wins' are translating into overall commercial improvement.Compare trend lines over the same period, not point-in-time snapshots. | Compare trend lines over the same period, not point-in-time snapshots. |
| Cross-channel overlap in reported revenue/conversions | Identifies double-counted results that make each individual agency's numbers look better than the combined reality.Reconcile against finance-confirmed revenue, not the sum of agency reports. | Reconcile against finance-confirmed revenue, not the sum of agency reports. |
| Time-to-decision on cross-channel trade-offs | Reveals whether the business can actually act on conflicts between agency recommendations.Track how long unresolved conflicting recommendations typically sit before a decision is made. | Track how long unresolved conflicting recommendations typically sit before a decision is made. |
| Test/initiative overlap across agencies | Surfaces duplicated effort and wasted spend.A simple cross-agency activity log, reviewed quarterly, is often revealing on its own. | A simple cross-agency activity log, reviewed quarterly, is often revealing on its own. |
| Commercial outcomes attributable to a named internal owner | Checks whether accountability for overall performance genuinely sits with someone inside the business.If no individual can be named, that itself is diagnostic. | If no individual can be named, that itself is diagnostic. |
Measurement traps
What can mislead you
- Looks fineEach agency is hitting their KPIs, so performance overall must be fine
- Individually achievable, narrow channel KPIs can coexist with poor overall commercial performance if those KPIs were never well-aligned to contribution margin in the first place, or if channels are cannibalising each other's results.
- Looks fineSwitching agencies will fix the underperformance
- If the underlying issue is unclear accountability or a structural silo problem, a new agency will likely be given the same narrow brief and produce a similar pattern of results within a similar timeframe.
- Looks fineThe agencies disagree, so one of them must be wrong
- Conflicting recommendations between specialist agencies often reflect genuinely different, defensible views from within their own channel's data, rather than one agency simply being incorrect — resolving it usually needs a cross-channel view neither agency has access to.
Outcome
What better looks like
Not a promised number. A clearer basis for the next investment decision.
- A named internal owner holds the combined commercial view across all agencies and channels
- Agency performance is judged against contribution margin impact, not solely the metrics each agency reports on itself
- Cross-channel trade-offs and conflicting recommendations have a clear, timely decision-making process
- Before any agency change is made, the business has ruled out structural and non-marketing causes of underperformance
Where a Growth Diagnostic would start
A three to four week senior review across demand, discovery, acquisition, conversion, retention, measurement and capability — sequenced so this problem is either confirmed as the constraint or ruled out early. Read alongside the ecommerce & retail model page for how we frame the wider system.
Related problems
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Growth team capability gaps
The constraint isn't strategy or budget, but who owns decisions, how fast they get made, and where execution bottlenecks sit.
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Marketing attribution is unclear
Every platform claims the credit and the numbers don't add up. A pragmatic approach to measurement that decisions can actually be based on.
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Paid media dependency
Growth only happens while spend keeps rising. A look at how much of that spend is creating demand versus capturing it.
Questions about this problem
- Will this review involve speaking to our agencies directly?
- Usually yes, alongside reviewing their reporting and data — understanding each agency's own view of performance and constraints is an important part of getting a fair, complete picture rather than working from data alone.
- What if the review finds it genuinely is an agency performance issue?
- That's a legitimate and useful outcome — the diagnostic gives you a clearer, evidenced basis for that conversation with the agency, or for a change, rather than a decision based on frustration or an incomplete view of the numbers.
- We only work with one agency, not several — is this still relevant?
- Yes, though the specific causes to check differ — the accountability and metric-alignment questions still apply even with a single agency, particularly around whether their reported KPIs genuinely reflect commercial value to the business.