From Vanity Metrics to Real Revenue: The In-House Digital Playbook

The hosts break down common early pitfalls, such as outsourcing execution before understanding channel mechanics, tracking vanity metrics instead of revenue, and spreading small teams across too many channels at once. They outline concrete strategies for briefing, evaluating, and holding external vendors accountable, alongside an honest breakdown of core growth channels including SEO, paid search, paid social, email, and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO.

What is The operators edge?

This podcast series provides practical, real-world insights on scaling digital businesses and adapting to major marketing shifts.

Most founders who decide to build a digital marketing capability, whether be it in their brand or a standalone digital marketing agency, make the same mistakes in the same order. They hire too fast. They focus on the wrong metrics. They cannot differentiate between output and activity. And finally, they bring in an outside agency without having the knowledge on metrics and the business to really manage them. In this episode, we talk about the mistakes we've made along the way and hope that you guys don't make that. This is the Operator's Edge. Every week or so, we sit down and talk about what happens with digital marketing and digital marketing businesses. This is a podcast series focused on building and running digital marketing agencies. Not what you see every day or hear, you know, consistent stories. This is about what it's taken for us to build our digital marketing company and also all the ways is that we failed but come out the other side.

Welcome to episode 2, building a digital marketing team from scratch. What actually works on 253 media. Okay, Mano, thanks for the introduction. I think what we're really trying to unpack here is what happens at the beginning when digital or when brands or operators are trying to determine what to do, whether it's hire an agency, build their own team, uh whatever the course of action is, what are the first things that need to be done or what are the first mistakes people make?

So, the default move that we've seen most brands do is uh hire a generalist and point them at social social media marketing.

You're talking about internally.

Internally, right? So, they think they've found they'll get somebody who knows a little bit about social media marketing and they'll start with that and that's what they think digital marketing starts and ends.

You're talking about somebody who might have a really nice Instagram handle and has followers themselves and you expect them to be able to do the same thing for you because they have somewhat found the secret sauce for themselves.

Absolutely. So, we've seen a lot of brands do this. They'll see somebody who's seen success for themselves on social media and they're like, "Okay, if they could do it for themselves, they'll do it for us." Not realizing that digital marketing is a notion and it is just not one discipline. It's a combination of multi-disciplines.

So that is the first default move you've seen people do and that's where I think the foundation starts to it doesn't build up the way it's supposed to and to be honest I've made that mistake too.

Yes. Exactly. Um the second thing is they'll focus on the wrong channel first. So I've seen again a lot of brands have not had a coherent strategy for digital marketing. So they did what was whatever was you know trendy at that moment what was in front of them. So the lot of the budgets were spent on channels which probably had very short-term outlooks.

Um which leads to the next problem was the attribution side. Well before you get to attribution you said that they might hire or they perhaps hire a generalist first then um pick the wrong channels, but at what point do they make the mistake of hiring an agency first without really knowing what they want from the agency? Or is that part of the whole chronology?

Yeah, that's part of the whole, you know, chronology because once you know they realize that, oh, my in-house person has not worked out the way we want to, let's go to the professional people who do this for a living, companies like us. So, they'll come to an agency and it's not like the agencies are not doing a good job or they're bad. It's just that the brief isn't correct a lot of time by their brands. They assume that the agency will figure out their product, their ICPs, their customer profile, everything, and they will start delivering. So the expectation hasn't lined up, the brief hasn't lined up, and then unfortunately the brand also starts looking at the vanity metrics. This is now compounding the issue where instead of looking at say CAC and other metrics which really affect the bottom line of the company, you're looking at impressions or reach.

And why is it? Just because they just don't know or...

It's a combination of half knowledge and also previous experiences with other maybe agencies or brand managers who have presented it in such a way showing that "Look at your reach, look at your impressions, we've gone through the roof." But when you actually drill down the numbers and you look at the metrics which matter, you're going to see a very different story. And now the problem between the brand and the marketing starts to bubble up because the marketing team is showing activity, you're not seeing output or conversions. And after a while, you're wondering about what your return on investment is, but you're already 6, 8 months, one year down the hatch.

That's expensive, very expensive. My goodness.

So this is something very common that we've seen with brands which have come to us over the years. I mean, we've managed in our group over 70, 80 brands and it's been a common situation with them.

So when you're talking about the vanity metrics, you previously mentioned attribution. Can you just describe what that means from a layman's point of view or like a 30,000-foot level? Because somebody listening to this may not understand what attribution is, and I think it's super vital that gets unpacked as we go forward here.

Right. So attribution in simple terms: if I have a $100 to spend, the goal is to know where to spend the $100 correctly, which channel... If I have $100 total as my spend on marketing, how much should go to SEO, how much should go to pay-per-click, how much should go to email, how much should go to XYZ? Before I know that, I need to know what channel has given me the maximum return or where I'm getting the maximum conversions or revenue from. For that, I need to know what we all know as attribution: How much can I attribute to each channel without doubt? Right now, there are conversations of whether one channel is your first click, a middle click, or a third click. How do you attribute it across channels? These are metrics we look at and equations we do.

This is one of my favorite topics. But we're not going to get into the real details here because we're going to have a whole other episode on attribution and I'm going to talk till my face goes blue. Because it's super important and it's where people misunderstand the user journey and how many times they are touched by different advertising verticals along the purchase experience.

Correct. And to sum it up, from the lens of a digital marketer or a brand, it is really important to know how your channels are performing. Once you know, "Okay, out of five channels, I know exactly how much each one is bringing," your decisions become much easier. And that's another mistake people make because every channel is going to say that they're doing better than the other one—your SEO team, your paid team, Meta vs Google, TikTok, email. If you look at all of them, you'd be at 700% ROAS, but that's not the case.

There are a lot of brands that come to us and want to do everything and we push back. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely. A brand comes to you and says, "Here's my budget and I want to do six items in it." As an agency, you have two options: either take it just to get the client or push back.

Can you give an example of what six things would be?

Brands come to us saying, "We want to do SEO, paid side, email marketing, social media postings, content marketing, LinkedIn." My pushback to them is that if you spread the budget over 6 or 7 channels, none of this is going to work properly.

So it's sort of this idea of an inch wide, a mile deep versus an inch deep and a mile wide.

Absolutely. If you have a brand with no digital presence, and competitors have been investing in SEO for 3 years, and they come with a minimum budget to do five things, we say: "Listen, you're already so far behind. Instead of spreading it out so thin, put that entire budget into one thing so you can start catching up." If you're in a heavily commoditized industry like t-shirts or baseball caps, and you're a new entrant with a small budget trying to spread it over social and everything, you're not going to win that. We push back and say, "Do not hire us if you expect this to happen without a time-taking, strategic process."

And you're talking about SEO right now.

Yeah. It's an investment like bodybuilding—you have to go to the gym every day. You can't have the beach body if you're jacked up on steroids and expect it to last. You need commitment and discipline across digital marketing as a whole.

Can you as an agency provide an operator or brand owner insight into how competitors are doing? Is that possible?

Yeah, absolutely. There are tools available to do competitor analysis research without accessing their private analytics. You can see their web traction, keywords, paid spend gaps, and performance in AI search. Getting the data is not enough—you have to analyze and interpret what the wall of numbers is telling you.

If you commit to SEO over a period of time, you build a real asset because that traffic doesn't stop when you turn off paid ads.

What is the most expensive mistake brands make when starting off in digital?

Hiring too fast internally, not giving the right person enough time, or jumping between agencies/strategies too quickly and resetting the clock to zero after 4 months.

What are the key factors when deciding to build an internal team vs. outsource?

Building an in-house team with full agency-level capabilities across execution, strategy, and management is very expensive. For smaller brands, having an internal marketing manager to manage an external agency is often the most effective structure.

What does a team structure look like at different growth stages?

At the channel level, the optimal structure resembles a pyramid:
1. Specialist (Executor closest to the specific channel optimizing bidding, keywords, etc.)
2. Strategist (Defines channel strategy)
3. Generalist (Sees the big picture across top, middle, and bottom of the funnel)

In smaller setups, one person may combine specialist and strategist roles. At scale, you can implement the "Pod System"—a cross-functional pod with dedicated team members for development, design, SEO, PPC, email, and project management so there are no friction points during client handoffs.