Resources · Guide · Sent by email · Updated

THE MARKETING DIAGNOSTIC

When marketing stops working, the first explanation offered is usually wrong. Find the actual fault before anyone gets fired or any budget gets moved.

What's inside

  1. 1

    Symptom, likely cause and first check across six areas

  2. 2

    Rule one, verify measurement first, the step that prevents most misdiagnoses

  3. 3

    Five questions to answer before you fire your agency

One email with the file. One follow-up with a single question. Nothing else.

If you would rather have this done with you than to you, this is the work I do. See services

Why the first explanation is usually wrong

When results drop, the explanation offered is whatever is most visible: the agency, the new campaign, the website. Visibility and causation are different things. This guide works backwards through the layers, demand, targeting, offer, conversion, measurement, so you find the layer that actually broke rather than the one somebody already had opinions about.

Use it before anyone gets fired

The most expensive marketing decisions I see are made in the fortnight after a bad quarter, on incomplete information, under pressure to act. Running a structured diagnostic first is slower by a few days and cheaper by a good deal more than that.

COMMON QUESTIONS

When should I run a marketing diagnostic?

Before you change anything. Specifically before you [replace an agency](/resources/agency-vetting-scorecard), cut a channel or rebuild a website, because all three are expensive and all three are commonly done in response to a problem somewhere else entirely.

What if the measurement itself is broken?

That is the most common finding, and the diagnostic checks it early for that reason. If two systems disagree about what happened, every explanation built on those numbers is guesswork, and fixing measurement has to come before fixing performance.

Can I run this without an analyst?

Yes. It is structured as questions rather than calculations. You need access to your reporting and someone willing to answer honestly about what is actually happening, which is harder to arrange than the analysis.