Whole-system diagnostic · Free index
Score the whole marketing system. Not one channel at a time.
Fourteen questions, about five minutes, and one number from 0 to 100 for how efficiently your marketing turns money into profit. We publish the weights and we source the benchmarks. No cost, no card.
Every audit you have been offered examines one channel.
Your paid account, your landing page, your rankings. Each one comes back saying that channel could be better, and each one is probably right. None of them can tell you the thing you actually need to know, which is whether the money is leaking out of the paid account or out of the twelve hours between an enquiry arriving and someone answering it.
Roughly 70% of marketing-generated leads are never pursued by anyone. That is a peer-reviewed finding from the Journal of Marketing, not an agency claim. No channel audit would ever find it. The Marketing Efficiency Index looks at the whole system instead.
Economics
Does a customer earn more than it costs to get one?
Demand
Is there enough qualified demand, from a defensible mix?
Conversion
Does attention become revenue, on the site and after it?
Measurement
Can you tell which pound made which pound?
Retention
Does a customer's value compound after the first sale?
Cadence
How fast does an observation become a change?
What you get
One number, and the six that make it
Your index from 0 to 100, the six pillar scores behind it, and the weight each one carried for a business like yours.
A visibility score, separately
How many questions about your own marketing you could not answer. Most people cannot answer three. That is the finding, not a gap in the test.
Three changes, ranked, with the points each is worth
At least one of them will not involve us.
Why it is different
Most scorecards measure whether you own the right software. This one measures whether the money works. We publish the weights, the scoring ladders, the four hard limits and the exact conditions under which our weights do not apply. You can disagree with the model, which is the point. Most tools in this category will not show you theirs.
And here is what it does not do. It does not read your accounts, so it cannot catch what you did not tell it. It is a fourteen-question self-assessment, which means it measures what you know about your marketing as much as your marketing. That is deliberate: not knowing is a finding. But it is not an audit, and we will not pretend it is one.
Questions people ask
- Is it really free? What is the catch?
- Yes, and the catch is that we are an agency. If the result is useful and you would rather we fixed the gap than fixed it yourself, that is what we sell. But one of your three recommendations will always be something you can do on Monday without us, and the pillar most companies score worst on has no MxD tool attached to it at all, because it is not a software problem. The index stands on its own either way.
- How is the score calculated?
- Six pillars, weighted by your business model, combined with a weighted geometric mean so that one broken area cannot hide behind a strong one. Four hard limits cap the score regardless of everything else. Four positive signals raise it. Every weight and every scoring ladder is published on the methodology page. We also publish the fact that swapping our weights for equal weights barely changes anyone’s ranking, which tells you the weights are not doing the work.
- Will it flatter me?
- No. A company that answers the worst option to every question scores about 15. A company that answers “I do not know” to everything also scores about 15, because ignorance is not neutrality. Fewer than 3% of companies should reach the top band. If you score 80, you have earned it.
- Where do the benchmarks come from?
- Published research, cited by name and sample size on the methodology page. Where no credible benchmark exists, and for several of these it does not, we say so rather than inventing one. There is no reliable published benchmark for blended marketing efficiency ratio, for example, so we ask whether you know your own breakeven instead of pretending to know what good looks like.