Most performance marketing agencies follow a consistent playbook. Set up ad accounts. Create campaigns. Optimise for platform metrics: clicks, impressions, cost per click, cost per lead. Send monthly reports showing they generated a certain number of leads at a certain cost.
On the surface, this looks productive. The numbers are going up. Leads are coming in. The agency is doing its job.
But here is the question nobody asks loudly enough:
What happened to those leads?
How many of the 200 leads from last month's campaign actually became customers? What revenue did they generate? What did it cost operationally to serve them? Were they the right customers for your business?
Most agencies cannot answer these questions because they have no access to the information. Their visibility ends at the point of lead submission. Everything that happens after, the follow-up, the quoting, the order, the fulfilment, is invisible to them.
This structural blindness means they are optimising for the wrong outcomes.