One of the reasons I was eager to join Ideate Creative was the opportunity to influence clients’ business decisions more directly and at a larger scale. Over the years I've been lucky to work with many talented, determined and really bright teams across agency, client or consultancy environments. But there was always a client or a team that pretty much self-sabotaged and compromised their long-term success because they were forced to follow the wrong strategy for one reason or another. They focused on the wrong KPIs and struggled to grow their channel or business even though they hit their targets every month.
We still see similar situations at Ideate. But luckily our job is to advise businesses and help them fix the issues that are stalling their growth.
In this post we look at:
Here are our six examples.
The KPI: ROI / ROAS
The issue: Efficiency can become a barrier to scale. While important KPIs, ROI and ROAS are relationship metrics that are not linked to volume or amount. Two campaigns with vastly different budgets can deliver the same ROAS whether they generated $100,000 or $1,000 in revenue.
Too much focus on ROAS and a rigid target may encourage teams to protect the overall ratio rather than grow the business:
The initial result can be presented as a great win: strong ROAS, controlled spend and efficient campaigns. But the business may still miss its growth target because it did not generate enough volume.
Another concern is that new channels, markets and campaigns sometimes need time and investment before performance improves. Judging them against mature-channel efficiency too early can eliminate future growth opportunities before they have had a chance to develop.
Instead, ask yourself: Are we maximizing a ratio or making the right trade-off between efficiency, volume and future growth? Can we tie ROAS to spend? Can we afford to be more flexible and run a “test & learn” programme?
The KPI: CPL
The issue: Cost Per Lead is another efficiency metric. But focusing on it causes a different issue - cheaper leads can turn into more expensive customers.
A falling cost per lead often is interpreted as progress because it may indicate better targeting, stronger creative or improved campaign efficiency. But CPL can also fall because a campaign is attracting people who are easier to convert into leads and harder to convert into customers.
In order to hit theirCPL target, marketing teams may use:
Then the Sales team needs to weed through the long list of leads spending more time filtering out weak demand. On paper, the cost has disappeared. But actually, it has just moved from media spend into sales time, slower conversion and lower pipeline quality.
Instead, ask yourself: What happens after a lead is generated? Do CPL and CAC have a healthy relationship? Does it make sense to tie CPL to CR as well?
The KPI: Number of free trials, demos or meetings booked
The issue: More prospects entering the funnel can create more work without creating more value.
A Sales or Business Development team rewarded heavily for volume will naturally optimize for volume rather than quality. Some consequences are that qualification thresholds may loosen, offers may become more aggressive and free trials may get promoted to people with limited purchase intent.
Then the cost appears downstream:
Sales has technically succeeded. But the business has paid for that success through higher servicing costs, weaker unit economics and wasted capacity.
Instead, ask yourself: Are we increasing genuine buying opportunities or simply increasing activity for the next team? What will make the two teams’ targets more complementary?
The KPI: Number of contacts in the database
The issue: A bigger audience is not necessarily a more valuable audience.
We admit that database growth can be commercially useful - it expands the business reach, supports lifecycle marketing and creates future demand. A large subscriber base may also look impressive in investor communications or media propositions, too. But total database size says very little about database health.
If acquisition becomes the priority, the business may continue adding contacts while active engagement falls. Old records remain untouched. Low-intent contacts dilute performance. Consent and deliverability risks accumulate. The headline number grows while the commercially useful audience shrinks as a proportion of the whole.
Eventually the business may face two problems: rebuilding the quality of the database as well as rebuilding its reputation and confidence in the claims previously made about its reach.
Instead, ask yourself: How large is the database we can genuinely engage, not simply store?
The KPI: Customer retention rate
The issue: Retaining every customer can destroy value.
Retention is essential in recurring-revenue businesses, but even a strategically important KPI can become damaging when treated as an absolute.
A Customer Success team under intense pressure to prevent churn may offer excessive discounts, absorb unreasonable servicing demands or dedicate disproportionate resources to customers with poor long-term economics impacting margin, team capacity and service quality elsewhere.
Some customers should be saved, others may need a different service model, and third may simply be a poor fit for the business. A retention target without enough commercial context can encourage teams to preserve revenue that costs too much to keep.
Instead, ask yourself: Are we retaining healthy customer value or protecting the headline retention number? Do we have clear an appropriate service level agreements? Can we segment our customer base better?
The KPI: Total number of tickets resolved by a Customer Support agent
The issue: Some businesses can see an opportunity to save money by reducing the number of Customer Support agents. The path to this is reducing the number of tickets resolved by CS agents. Achieving this goal may erode into reducing the number of total contacts with CS agents by hiding the CS contact form, email address and phone number as well as the “Speak to an Agent” option now available through many CS chatbots.
There are good reasons to reduce avoidable support demand. Self-service journeys, clear FAQs and well-designed automation can resolve simple issues faster while freeing agents to handle more complex problems.
However, when minimizing agent contact becomes the target, the lack of proper customer support may lead to poorer conversion rates and damaged brand perception. Some customers may be struggling with checkout, subscriptions, pricing, eligibility or a promotional offer and others.
In addition , people who cannot get help may abandon conversion, leave negative reviews, complain on social media or ask communities such as Reddit whether others have had the same experience. Marketing then inherits a problem it did not create: weaker conversion, visible negative sentiment and a trust issue that paid media alone cannot fix.
Instead, ask yourself: Are we reducing unnecessary contact or making it harder for customers to buy and get help?
Having seen this inside businesses and across client work, two causes come up repeatedly: short-term thinking and disconnected targets.
Short reporting cycles encourage short optimization cycles – teams focused only on hitting this month’s target, departments pushing to protect this quarter’s performance and leaders scrambling to explain the numbers at the next board meeting.
Under that pressure, decisions that improve the immediate KPIs can appear more attractive than decisions that build sustainable performance. But leaders need to be aware that a KPI that moves in the right direction may have a cost that appears later.
The second problem is structural. Departments are often given targets independently, even though customers move continuously between them. When those targets are designed separately, one team can hit its KPI by making the next team’s job harder or more expensive. That is where local optimization becomes a business problem.
Businesses still need detailed metrics. Specialists need operational data to improve performance and department leaders need clear targets.
The answer is not to replace everything with revenue and tell every team to think commercially. That would remove much of the detail needed to understand why performance is changing. The better approach is to develop complimentary targets and test whether the KPI system works as a whole.
A useful review should ask:
Many KPI problems are not solved by removing a metric. They are solved by adding the context that prevents one metric from dominating the decision.
When performance is under pressure, the instinct is often to add more reporting: another dashboard, another attribution view, another weekly meeting. But if the underlying targets are disconnected, more reporting simply gives the business a more detailed view of the same problem.
A proper marketing audit should go further. It should examine what the company is trying to achieve, how that translates into departmental targets, which behaviors those targets encourage and whether performance at one stage supports or undermines the next.
That means looking across strategy, channels, conversion, customer journeys, sales handoffs, measurement and commercial outcomes rather than auditing each campaign in isolation. For some businesses, that review can be completed as a focused strategic exercise. For others, the issue is ongoing - priorities change, teams grow, new channels are introduced and yesterday’s KPI framework stops reflecting today’s business.
That is where senior marketing leadership can help keep strategy, targets and execution connected over time because the hidden cost of reporting on the wrong KPIs is the decisions people make to hit them.
We run marketing audits and offer CMO as a Service options that can help companies grow faster, more efficiently and more sustainably. To see how more efficient growth can look for your brand.
Written by Slavina Velinova, VP Stratgy at Ideate Creative.
_ _ _ _
Review our marketing strategy & digital growth service here.
Need marketing support? Contact us to hear more.
One of the reasons I was eager to join Ideate Creative was the opportunity to influence clients’ business decisions more directly and at a larger scale. Over the years I've been lucky to work with many talented, determined and really bright teams across agency, client or consultancy environments. But there was always a client or a team that pretty much self-sabotaged and compromised their long-term success because they were forced to follow the wrong strategy for one reason or another. They focused on the wrong KPIs and struggled to grow their channel or business even though they hit their targets every month.
We still see similar situations at Ideate. But luckily our job is to advise businesses and help them fix the issues that are stalling their growth.
In this post we look at:
Here are our six examples.
The KPI: ROI / ROAS
The issue: Efficiency can become a barrier to scale. While important KPIs, ROI and ROAS are relationship metrics that are not linked to volume or amount. Two campaigns with vastly different budgets can deliver the same ROAS whether they generated $100,000 or $1,000 in revenue.
Too much focus on ROAS and a rigid target may encourage teams to protect the overall ratio rather than grow the business:
The initial result can be presented as a great win: strong ROAS, controlled spend and efficient campaigns. But the business may still miss its growth target because it did not generate enough volume.
Another concern is that new channels, markets and campaigns sometimes need time and investment before performance improves. Judging them against mature-channel efficiency too early can eliminate future growth opportunities before they have had a chance to develop.
Instead, ask yourself: Are we maximizing a ratio or making the right trade-off between efficiency, volume and future growth? Can we tie ROAS to spend? Can we afford to be more flexible and run a “test & learn” programme?
The KPI: CPL
The issue: Cost Per Lead is another efficiency metric. But focusing on it causes a different issue - cheaper leads can turn into more expensive customers.
A falling cost per lead often is interpreted as progress because it may indicate better targeting, stronger creative or improved campaign efficiency. But CPL can also fall because a campaign is attracting people who are easier to convert into leads and harder to convert into customers.
In order to hit theirCPL target, marketing teams may use:
Then the Sales team needs to weed through the long list of leads spending more time filtering out weak demand. On paper, the cost has disappeared. But actually, it has just moved from media spend into sales time, slower conversion and lower pipeline quality.
Instead, ask yourself: What happens after a lead is generated? Do CPL and CAC have a healthy relationship? Does it make sense to tie CPL to CR as well?
The KPI: Number of free trials, demos or meetings booked
The issue: More prospects entering the funnel can create more work without creating more value.
A Sales or Business Development team rewarded heavily for volume will naturally optimize for volume rather than quality. Some consequences are that qualification thresholds may loosen, offers may become more aggressive and free trials may get promoted to people with limited purchase intent.
Then the cost appears downstream:
Sales has technically succeeded. But the business has paid for that success through higher servicing costs, weaker unit economics and wasted capacity.
Instead, ask yourself: Are we increasing genuine buying opportunities or simply increasing activity for the next team? What will make the two teams’ targets more complementary?
The KPI: Number of contacts in the database
The issue: A bigger audience is not necessarily a more valuable audience.
We admit that database growth can be commercially useful - it expands the business reach, supports lifecycle marketing and creates future demand. A large subscriber base may also look impressive in investor communications or media propositions, too. But total database size says very little about database health.
If acquisition becomes the priority, the business may continue adding contacts while active engagement falls. Old records remain untouched. Low-intent contacts dilute performance. Consent and deliverability risks accumulate. The headline number grows while the commercially useful audience shrinks as a proportion of the whole.
Eventually the business may face two problems: rebuilding the quality of the database as well as rebuilding its reputation and confidence in the claims previously made about its reach.
Instead, ask yourself: How large is the database we can genuinely engage, not simply store?
The KPI: Customer retention rate
The issue: Retaining every customer can destroy value.
Retention is essential in recurring-revenue businesses, but even a strategically important KPI can become damaging when treated as an absolute.
A Customer Success team under intense pressure to prevent churn may offer excessive discounts, absorb unreasonable servicing demands or dedicate disproportionate resources to customers with poor long-term economics impacting margin, team capacity and service quality elsewhere.
Some customers should be saved, others may need a different service model, and third may simply be a poor fit for the business. A retention target without enough commercial context can encourage teams to preserve revenue that costs too much to keep.
Instead, ask yourself: Are we retaining healthy customer value or protecting the headline retention number? Do we have clear an appropriate service level agreements? Can we segment our customer base better?
The KPI: Total number of tickets resolved by a Customer Support agent
The issue: Some businesses can see an opportunity to save money by reducing the number of Customer Support agents. The path to this is reducing the number of tickets resolved by CS agents. Achieving this goal may erode into reducing the number of total contacts with CS agents by hiding the CS contact form, email address and phone number as well as the “Speak to an Agent” option now available through many CS chatbots.
There are good reasons to reduce avoidable support demand. Self-service journeys, clear FAQs and well-designed automation can resolve simple issues faster while freeing agents to handle more complex problems.
However, when minimizing agent contact becomes the target, the lack of proper customer support may lead to poorer conversion rates and damaged brand perception. Some customers may be struggling with checkout, subscriptions, pricing, eligibility or a promotional offer and others.
In addition , people who cannot get help may abandon conversion, leave negative reviews, complain on social media or ask communities such as Reddit whether others have had the same experience. Marketing then inherits a problem it did not create: weaker conversion, visible negative sentiment and a trust issue that paid media alone cannot fix.
Instead, ask yourself: Are we reducing unnecessary contact or making it harder for customers to buy and get help?
Having seen this inside businesses and across client work, two causes come up repeatedly: short-term thinking and disconnected targets.
Short reporting cycles encourage short optimization cycles – teams focused only on hitting this month’s target, departments pushing to protect this quarter’s performance and leaders scrambling to explain the numbers at the next board meeting.
Under that pressure, decisions that improve the immediate KPIs can appear more attractive than decisions that build sustainable performance. But leaders need to be aware that a KPI that moves in the right direction may have a cost that appears later.
The second problem is structural. Departments are often given targets independently, even though customers move continuously between them. When those targets are designed separately, one team can hit its KPI by making the next team’s job harder or more expensive. That is where local optimization becomes a business problem.
Businesses still need detailed metrics. Specialists need operational data to improve performance and department leaders need clear targets.
The answer is not to replace everything with revenue and tell every team to think commercially. That would remove much of the detail needed to understand why performance is changing. The better approach is to develop complimentary targets and test whether the KPI system works as a whole.
A useful review should ask:
Many KPI problems are not solved by removing a metric. They are solved by adding the context that prevents one metric from dominating the decision.
When performance is under pressure, the instinct is often to add more reporting: another dashboard, another attribution view, another weekly meeting. But if the underlying targets are disconnected, more reporting simply gives the business a more detailed view of the same problem.
A proper marketing audit should go further. It should examine what the company is trying to achieve, how that translates into departmental targets, which behaviors those targets encourage and whether performance at one stage supports or undermines the next.
That means looking across strategy, channels, conversion, customer journeys, sales handoffs, measurement and commercial outcomes rather than auditing each campaign in isolation. For some businesses, that review can be completed as a focused strategic exercise. For others, the issue is ongoing - priorities change, teams grow, new channels are introduced and yesterday’s KPI framework stops reflecting today’s business.
That is where senior marketing leadership can help keep strategy, targets and execution connected over time because the hidden cost of reporting on the wrong KPIs is the decisions people make to hit them.
We run marketing audits and offer CMO as a Service options that can help companies grow faster, more efficiently and more sustainably. To see how more efficient growth can look for your brand.
Written by Slavina Velinova, VP Stratgy at Ideate Creative.
_ _ _ _
Review our marketing strategy & digital growth service here.
Need marketing support? Contact us to hear more.
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