“Waiting for Results” – Is Your Agency Working or Just Buying Time?

Imagine the situation: you are about to have a meeting with the Board to present marketing and sales results from the beginning of the year. The CEO asks, “Why are sales stagnant, even though we increased the budget?” And what do you answer? If the only thing the agency conveyed to you, along with the reports, is conclusions that “campaigns are still learning, and SEO needs more time,” you have just lost control over the narrative. You don’t really have any good arguments for the Board.

Waiting for results in business is acceptable only when it is a managed and planned process, not an excuse for a lack of process and commitment. The CEO does not pay for a lack of insights and the constant postponing of results. They pay for progress and results in the form of sales growth. As the person reporting activities to the board, you must have a trusted business partner on the other side who will reliably deliver work that delivers real ROI.

Agencies like to use nice words and phrases that mean little to the other party: “The algorithm is still crunching data, and we are waiting for effects”, “Google is still indexing these pages” – let’s break this down into its core components and discuss the most common myths.

SEM (paid campaigns): The “eternal campaign learning” myth – many agencies claim that the campaign is not bringing sales results because advertising systems need weeks to learn.

• Simple fact-check: Systems actually learn quickly, usually in a few weeks (but closer to 4 than 8) if they have the right data. So if your agency, in the fourth month of cooperation, says that “the system is still learning”, it means that it has either configured the analytics poorly, is not providing fuel (data), or is not telling the truth. This is human error, and hiding behind system issues is just an excuse.

SEO: The “nothing is happening because we are waiting for Google” myth.

• Fact-check: Indeed, you sometimes have to wait months for sales results. However, you shouldn’t have to wait for the changes to be implemented. If in the first month of the year and cooperation, no new content was created, 404 errors haven’t disappeared, linking hasn’t been improved, and there are no signals that the website is gaining traction, this is not “time needed for SEO results”. It is wasted time, resulting from the agency’s lack of processing capacity, unfairly blamed on the Google algorithm.

How do you recognize if an agency is playing for time? If you receive a signal that you will have to wait a bit for the results, you need to recognize two key states – passive and active waiting. By recognizing these situations, you will know exactly what to report to the Board.

Passive waiting (red flag):

• The agency sends a report, and the only comment is “Positions are stable, we are waiting.”
• There are no changes in the ad account history, and no new content or subpages in SEO.
• A passive agency will send an audit with a list of 50 things for your IT department to fix, and then use the wait for implementation as a pretext to explain the lack of results.
• Diagnosis? The agency is counting on a “stroke of luck,” which is asking for trouble and a lack of return on investment in Q2.

Active waiting (green flag):

• The final results (sales KPIs) may not be delivered yet, but:
  • The agency reports what is happening while waiting, e.g.: “We excluded 1000 words from the strategy that were ineffective”, “We rebuilt the header structure on 20 pages,” etc.
  • An active agency, seeing that your IT department has no capacity, says: “Give us FTP/CMS access, our development team will implement these critical changes in 48h”.

Active waiting signals that the whole process is an investment. Although the result has not yet been achieved, the work to get there is in full swing, and you have an engaged business partner cooperating on the other side.

Do not go to the Board with ignorance and empty hands. Instead of reporting that we are still waiting for a return on investment and results, use the language of “building”.

When the CEO asks about the results of the campaigns being run, and you know you have to wait for sales, use the theory of Leading Indicators.

Instead of saying: “We have to wait for effects in the form of sales growth”, say: “Revenue has not increased yet, but this is a natural pattern in the first month of activities. However, we have already fixed the foundations:

1. Traffic quality has increased (the site is recording a lower Bounce Rate),
2. Visibility for long-tail phrases jumped by 30%,
3. We eliminated technical errors blocking the shopping cart, thanks to which we forecast an increase in conversions.
4. The agency is implementing the plan in accordance with the roadmap.