First meeting with an agency: twelve words you end up haggling over
Meeting room, first meeting
Agency Let's start with the KPI. What counts as a result this quarter — leads, sales, awareness?
Founder Sales. We have leads. We have nobody to call them.
Head of Marketing Then landing page CVR stays above four, and you report on ROI, not on leads. Otherwise you flood us with forms and sales don't move.
Agency Can we see the funnel after the form?
Head of Marketing A spreadsheet and two salespeople. There is a tracking pixel, but it stops at the form. It never sees the purchase.
Agency Then week one is a pixel on the purchase. Without it, retargeting has nobody to show ads to.
Founder This is all budget. I want one number: money in, sales out.
Agency Month one is a test. A/B testing on the landing page, two audiences, then you get your number.
Head of Marketing And incrementality. Brand search is growing without you. We are not paying for that.
Agency Could you send us your past buyers? We'd build a lookalike audience off them.
Head of Marketing Hashed. First-party data doesn't leave the building.
Founder Vets. Own practice, thirty-five to fifty. Go and find them.
Head of Marketing For the brief: north star metric is paid orders. The rest is yours.
A first meeting isn't a negotiation about numbers. It's about words: whoever says one owns it. The brief gets written in the same words a week later.
The result is named first, the money last
Between the two sits everything that has to be built before a result can be measured: a funnel, a pixel, a test. And one word at the end, with which the client takes the conversation back.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator)KPI (indicador clave)
A key number a team tracks to judge whether it's hitting its goals.
Signups were the headline KPI for the launch quarter.
Where it starts, and as a question rather than an answer. By the end of the meeting it's clear whose they are.
CVR (Conversion Rate)CVR (tasa de conversión)
The share of visitors who complete a desired action out of the total.
A clearer checkout raised the landing page's CVR.
The first condition marketing sets the agency. Leads without it are half a promise.
ROI (Return on Investment)ROI (retorno de la inversión)
The profit earned relative to the money put into a campaign or channel.
The email channel showed the strongest ROI of anything we ran.
Marketing's word, not the agency's: reporting on it means counting sales. Mixed up with ROAS, which counts revenue where this one counts profit.
Landing pagePágina de destino (landing)
The standalone page a visitor lands on after clicking an ad or link, built for one action.
A focused landing page converted far better than the homepage.
Where everything argued about in this meeting comes to rest: CVR, the pixel, the test.
FunnelEmbudo
The staged path people move through from first awareness to a final action.
Most of the drop-off in the funnel happened right at signup.
The agency asks about it to find out where its own job ends. "A spreadsheet" is also an answer.
Tracking pixelPíxel de seguimiento
A tiny invisible image that fires to record a visit or action.
The ad platform's tracking pixel wasn't on the thank-you page.
People say it is "on" or "not on", like a meter. The only question is how far down the path it reaches.
Retargeting
Showing ads to people who already visited your site or app, matched by a pixel or audience list.
Retargeting followed cart abandoners with the exact item they left.
The first thing offered when the funnel leaks after the form. Mixed up with remarketing: that one is emails, this one is ads.
A/B testingTest A/B
Comparing two versions with live traffic to see which performs better.
A/B testing the headline lifted signups by a clear margin.
The agency's reply to any "just give me one number". A month of testing is also a month of budget.
IncrementalityIncrementalidad
The extra conversions a campaign truly caused, beyond what would happen anyway.
A holdout test showed the brand ads had little incrementality.
The least comfortable word in the room, and it is the paying side that says it. Rarely confused with ROAS, constantly confused with "sales are up".
Lookalike audienceAudiencia similar (lookalike)
A new audience the platform builds to resemble your existing customers.
A lookalike audience off top spenders found buyers we'd have missed.
The reason the agency asks for the list of buyers. From there the conversation heads to legal.
First-party dataDatos propios (first-party)
Customer data a company collects directly from its own audience, site, or app.
With cookies fading, the team leaned on first-party data from signups.
The word marketing uses to refuse without saying no. Hashes are the compromise both sides can live with.
North star metricMétrica norte (north star)
The single metric that best captures the core value a product delivers.
The team rallied around weekly active teams as its north star.
The word that closes the KPI conversation at the end. There can be many KPIs; there is one of these, and the client names it.
The brief will arrive in the same words
A week on it lands in your inbox, and half its lines come from this meeting. This time you'll be arguing with the text in front of you.
Questions and answers
What about the rest of the words in this field?
On the deck page, all of them. These twelve are the ones that came up in one meeting.
Why is there Spanish on the card?
In Spanish the funnel is an "embudo" and the pixel a "píxel de seguimiento", while retargeting stays retargeting. Both forms sit on one card, so you can tell which words travel and which don't.
Where do the definitions come from?
From the Digital Marketing deck — the same cards as in the app.
At the next meeting there will be a different twelve.
The Digital Marketing deck holds the rest — in the app they come a few a day.
