FIELD NOTES — MARKET FORCES
What decides the result before anyone touches a campaign
SETTLED IN ADVANCE
Why these five are settled before any spend decision
Some things about a market are decided before anybody opens an ad account. How the auction is priced. What the business already carries in local standing. How crowded the catchment is. How old the site is. Who actually holds the budget. None of these is a campaign decision, and all of them constrain what a campaign can achieve.
Almost every agency sells the treatment. Almost nobody prices the conditions it will run under — which is how an operator ends up with an ambitious plan aimed at a market that was never going to produce it, and a year later a conversation about whether the work was executed properly.
These are the things we explain repeatedly and that get overlooked every time, so they are written down, each with its source under the figure. Several carry a test you can run yourself without hiring anyone. That is deliberate: work that is only useful once you have paid for it is not evidence of anything.
We publish these one at a time rather than all at once, so each one gets read rather than skimmed. The next is written and waiting on the one before it.
THE FACTORS
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Search advertising did not simply get more expensive. A federal court found the increases were deliberate, sized to be mistaken for ordinary auction fluctuation, and that 85% of advertisers blamed themselves.
READ THE EVIDENCE →
THE FACTORS — WRITTEN UP NEXT
FACTOR 02
Review position
Where a location sits on rating and review volume relative to the businesses it appears beside sets the ceiling on everything bought above it. It affects click-through from the map, it affects whether a paid click converts, and in a group it is one of the most reliable explanations for why two sites on identical spend perform differently. It is also slow to move, which is why it belongs in the pre-spend reading rather than in the campaign plan. Written up next.
FACTOR 03
Market saturation
How many comparable providers are inside the same drive time, and how much of the available demand is already spoken for. Saturation does not merely raise the price of a click; it changes what a realistic share looks like, and in the most crowded catchments the honest recommendation is a lower budget, a different service line, or no spend at all. Written up next.
FACTOR 04
Site maturity
Domain age, accumulated authority and existing indexed depth decide how quickly search work can compound. Two groups running identical programmes will separate on this alone, and it is the factor most often mistaken for execution quality in the first two quarters. Written up next.
FACTOR 05
Ownership structure
Who holds the budget, who has to approve, and what timescale they are judged on. A sponsor-held platform with a defined hold period, an owner planning to sell in two years, and a partnership with no exit intention will each get a different answer to the same question — and an agency that does not ask this first will be optimising for the wrong horizon. Written up next.
HOW THIS FITS
| BENCHMARKS → | Where you stand. Median, quartile and top-decile reference ranges by specialty. |
| DIFFERENTIALS → | What is likely wrong, how to tell the causes apart, and what resolves each. |
| PROGNOSIS | What determines how it will go, before anyone does anything. |
| SOURCES → | How we know any of it — and which sources we refuse to use. |
WHEN THE READING IS POOR
What we tell an operator when the reading is poor
That the plan is not achievable in this market on this budget, and what would have to change first.
Sometimes the answer is that the constraint is not marketing at all — a catchment with no room in it, a site with no accumulated authority, a review position that will take a year of operational work to move. In those cases spending is not merely inefficient, it is the wrong instrument, and saying so early costs us a fee we would otherwise have collected for a year.
Sometimes the answer is that the work is worth doing but the horizon is longer than the owner has been told, and the honest conversation is about which quarter to expect what — before the money is committed, not after.
And sometimes the answer is that we are the wrong firm for it. Six engagements a quarter only means anything if the filter is real, and a firm that publishes the conditions under which it declines the work is the only kind worth believing when it says the work will succeed.
A prognosis narrows what is realistic. It does not replace the examination — that is what the six weeks are for.
APPLY — 6 / QUARTER →