About ASqware, an SEO and digital marketing agency for global brands

Almost every business we meet has been through the same cycle at least once. An agency is hired, a monthly report starts arriving, the numbers in it go up, and after a year nobody in the business can say whether it produced any customers. The relationship ends, another agency is hired, and the cycle repeats with a different logo on the report.

The cause is rarely incompetence. It is that most marketing reporting measures activity, because activity is easy to measure and always looks like progress. Impressions rise. Rankings improve. Engagement is up. None of it is untrue, and none of it answers the only question the person paying actually has.

We started ASqware to work the other way round: begin with what a customer is worth, work backwards to what an enquiry can cost, and report against that from the first month — including in the months when the answer is uncomfortable.

Small teams, senior people, and a fixed order of operations. We establish the economics, rebuild the measurement, fix the foundations, then run the programme. Skipping the first two steps is how a year gets spent optimising something that was never measurable, and it is the most common thing we are asked to undo.

We also keep the client list deliberately short. An agency that takes on everyone ends up staffing accounts with whoever is free, which is precisely how the senior person from the pitch stops appearing on the calls.

That an agency should be easy to leave. Accounts in your name, code in your repository, content you own outright. If staying is a decision rather than a switching cost, the work has to be good enough to justify itself every quarter.

That saying no is part of the job. Some businesses do not need what we sell, some budgets are too thin to produce data worth acting on, and some briefs are asking marketing to solve a product or pricing problem. Taking that work anyway is how agencies acquire unhappy clients.

And that the uncomfortable version of a report is the useful one. A month where something did not work, stated plainly with what we are changing, is worth more to you than a month of green arrows pointing at metrics nobody asked about.