166 - How Do You Know If Your Agency Is Actually Good?

Most sports teams hire an agency to sell more tickets — then evaluate them on impressions, clicks, and CPM. In Episode 166, Jeremy Neisser breaks down why those vanity metrics are misleading, what an outside marketing partner can and can't control, and the conversion-focused metrics that actually tell you whether your agency is earning its fee. A practical episode for any marketing director, ticket sales leader, or revenue officer evaluating an outside partner this season.

KEY TOPICS COVERED
- Why most sports teams are scoring their agency on the wrong scoreboard — and what to use instead
- The difference between vanity metrics (impressions, clicks, CPM, reach) and revenue-driving metrics (conversions, cost per buyer, attributed revenue)
- Why huge website traffic with no buyers means the campaign didn't work
- What marketing can fix — and what it can't (pricing, schedule, fan experience, ticketing UX)
- "Marketing is multiplication, not magic": how a weak offer or broken product gets amplified, not solved
- How to spot the silent killer of agency partnerships: chaos creation vs. chaos reduction
- The exact KPIs to hold your agency accountable to: conversions, conversion rate, cost per purchase, cost per lead, repeat buyers, AOV, retargeting growth, attributed revenue
- Why pattern recognition and platform speed are the real product you're paying for
- How a great agency lets a marketing director get out of the "0-2 count" mindset and operate proactively
- What separates a transactional vendor from a true strategic partner
- The right questions to ask when reviewing your current agency's performance

TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] – Why evaluating a sports marketing agency is harder than it looks
[00:25] – The vanity-metric trap: why impressions and clicks mislead leadership
[00:53] – Why heavy website traffic still produces flat ticket sales
[01:22] – The metrics that actually drive growth and ROI
[01:45] – What marketing can't fix: pricing, schedule, and operational issues
[02:14] – Red flags: agencies that create chaos instead of reducing it
[02:43] – Tactical work vs. strategic impact in agency evaluation
[03:07] – Why attribution and proactive reporting separate good agencies from bad
[03:35] – Building collaborative relationships, not vendor relationships
[04:04] – Using your agency to actually understand fan behavior
[04:32] – Where marketing hits a wall against broken business systems
[05:01] – How the right agency brings clarity and reduces internal chaos
[05:30] – Reactive vs. proactive communication: how to tell the difference
[06:00] – Holding agencies accountable on sales and revenue, not activity
[06:29] – Why strategic insight beats surface-level metrics every time
[07:00] – How agency partnerships evolve from transactional to strategic
[07:26] – Measuring agency success through conversions and audience growth
[07:55] – The role of attribution and clear, honest reporting
[08:16] – The daily firefight in sports marketing — and how an agency should ease it
[08:46] – Pattern recognition, trend identification, and creative testing speed
[09:13] – When an agency challenges assumptions and sparks new ideas
[09:40] – Building a strategic partnership focused on tickets and fan growth
[10:09] – The real value of proactive trend analysis and outside perspective
[10:37] – Main takeaways: business impact over vanity metrics
[11:04] – Why marketing amplifies — but doesn't solve — operational issues
[11:33] – Clarity and strategic collaboration as the new standard
[11:59] – How to honestly assess your current agency's reporting
[12:21] – Free 30-minute consult: get a second opinion on your agency reports
[12:48] – Final thoughts and how to share this with your team

CALL TO ACTION
If you're working with an outside marketing partner and you're not sure whether the reporting you're getting actually proves they're moving the needle, Jeremy is offering a free 30-minute conversation to walk through it with you. No pitch, no strings — just clarity. Grab a slot at sportsmarketingmachine.com.

RESOURCES & LINKS
Revelocity Sports: https://revelocitysports.com/
Jeremy Neisser on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jeremyneisser
Free 30-Minute Marketing Consultation: https://sportsmarketingmachine.com/

QUOTE PULLS
Jeremy Neisser: "Clicks don't pay the bills. Impressions don't pay the bills. Conversions do."

Jeremy Neisser: "Traffic without conversion is just noise."

Jeremy Neisser: "Marketing is multiplication, not magic. If the underlying experience is broken, marketing just amplifies the problem."

Jeremy Neisser: "A good agency should reduce chaos, not create it. If your agency creates more fires than they put out, that's a problem."

Jeremy Neisser: "The best agencies don't just run ads and send reports. They become strategic partners — they challenge assumptions, bring ideas, and connect your marketing to revenue."

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Transcript

Jeremy Neisser (00:00.34)
Welcome to episode 166 of the Sports Marketing Machine Podcast, powered by Revelocity Sports, the podcast that helps you sell more tickets and grow your fan base. I'm your host, Jeremy Neiser. Today we're talking about something that a lot of sports organizations struggle with. And in fact, it's came up in multiple conversations over the last three weeks.

in organizations that we work with or even just relationships that we have with sports teams. How do you actually know if the marketing agency that you've hired is doing a great job? Because this is where it gets messy really fast. Most teams hire an agency hoping for more ticket sales, more fans, and more revenue, but then they evaluate things and evaluate success by impressions, clicks, likes,

Cost per thousand impressions and really vague awareness metrics. Meanwhile, your tickets are staying flat or even dip a little bit, leadership's getting frustrated, and nobody really knows what's actually working. So today we're gonna break down what an agency should actually help improve. Part of it is ticket sales, but other things as well. What metrics truly matter? What they can control.

and what they can't control and how sports teams should properly evaluate outside marketing partners. Let's get going.

Jeremy Neisser (01:45.486)
So let's start off with one of the biggest issues that I see just in conversations with teams. We're not digging down deep into the metrics and tracking things and what have you. It's really high-level conversations. But the biggest issue that I see is most sports teams evaluate agencies using vanity metrics. Things like impressions, clicks, engagements, cost per thousand in reach. And those things

Do matter to an extent, but they're not the end goal. Clicks don't pay the bills. Impressions don't pay the bills. Conversions do. A campaign can generate massive reach, chip really cheap clicks, lots of people to the website, lots of engagement, and still not sell any tickets. We've seen this before. We get a lot of traffic to the website and no one buys. They're tire kickers, right? So did the did the campaign work?

No, cause the ultimate goal is to sell more tickets, which is the whole reason why we're spending money with an agency to take this off of our plate. Cause they are experts at this specific field. It's kind of like hiring a plumber to fix something inside of our house. Like we're hiring an expert to do something, and the end goal is to, in our case, sell more tickets, right?

But oftentimes teams get fooled because those reports look impressive. They're different and you're looking at information that would be like, hey, this is awesome. We're getting a lot of traffic to our website. But traffic without conversion is just noise. You can get all the website traffic in the world, but if no one buys, it doesn't really matter. What you should care about is this: conversions. Absolutely, right out of the gate.

Cost per buyer, conversion rate, repeat buyer, average order of value, i if we're improving our funnel, retargeting growth, attributed revenue. Those are some big things there, but at the end of the day, are we selling more tickets today by having someone else do it than we are than if we did it in-house, right? Do we understand our fans better now than we did six minutes ago, or six months ago rather?

Jeremy Neisser (04:04.492)
Because a great agencies agency should create clarity. You should know what's working, what isn't, where buyers are coming from, what audiences convert, and what offers resonate, and of course where your funnel is leaking. Because six months later, if you still don't understand your business better, well that's a problem. Right now, here's the important part of this too. Most agencies are not magicians. Some agencies are

Are doing a marvelous job and ticket sales still struggle. Some agencies are doing a gr good job, but ticket sales still struggle. Why? You're probably like shaking your head like Jeremy, that doesn't make a lick of sense what you just said. Because marketing cannot fix everything. Marketing can increase your awareness, can drive traffic to your website, can it move people to the consideration phase.

But they can't always fix bad pricing, weak offers, poor schedule, rainouts, terrible theme nights, bag ticketing, UX, which is the user experience, operational e issues, or a weak fan experience. And honestly, sometimes organizations expect agencies to perform miracles. And I can hear agency owners right now saying hallelujah, praise Jeremy. Sometimes organizations.

Teams expect agencies to perform miracles. If the buying process is broken, the offer isn't compelling, the product isn't exciting, or retention stinks, marketing can only do so much. So don't blame marketing. All of these other problems are still problems. Marketing is multiplication, not magic. If the underlying lying experience is broken, marketing.

Just amplifies the problem. All right. So good agencies should be able to save you time, not create more chaos. And this is a huge one because a good agency should reduce chaos, not create more up more of it. And honestly, a lot of bad partnerships between agencies and teams fail here. You know the type constant emergency requests, last-minute asset needs.

Jeremy Neisser (06:29.462)
No system, no communication, constant scrambling. Your internal team, your marketing director, is become more overwhelmed instead of less, which is the whole reason why they're hiring an agency to do this, right? That's not a good partnership. A good outside partner should simplify workflow workflows, improve reporting, reduce your manual work, build processes, bring in organization and bring consistency to what you are trying to accomplish.

So if your agency that you're working with right now creates more fires than they put out, that's a problem. So let's get to the point of what you should actually measure. Trying to get tactical here. What should sports teams evaluate their agencies on? First thing that I look at: conversions. Number one, flat out conversions. Number two, conversion rate. Number three,

Cost per purchase, cost per lead, audience growth, any of those, depending on what your objectives are. It may be email list growth. So you might be running lead gen campaigns, or you're just trying to grow a retargeting pool to be able to sell more tickets too. Like whatever your objective is, and everyone raises their hand saying, Hey, that's how we're gonna measure success, that right there in itself is how you hold tea how how you hold agencies accountable, right?

And in order to do that, they need to be able to attribute revenue, they need to be able to have clarity on reporting, and their communication should be proactive, not reactive. Honestly, sometimes the biggest value for teams is insight. A great agency should understand trends faster than you would.

identify leaks faster than you would and learn the platforms a whole lot faster and test creative doing these things a whole lot faster because simply if you are in sports you are playing whack a mole all day long. Every single day most marketing directors show up and I'm gonna use a baseball analogy with an O two count. Like you're already in the hole because your list of things to do got so long that you're just trying to to put fires out and get all this stuff done, especially during the season. Right.

Jeremy Neisser (08:46.306)
But here's the thing, a great agency should really be able to take some of that stuff off your plate so you don't feel like you're in an O2 hole. You feel like, all right, I can tackle the day rather than just try to stiff arm things and take care of things as they're flying at me. You can be proactive, not reactive. That's what a great agency should be doing. You're paying for pattern recognition, clarity, you're paying for things that allow them to

To think clearly instead of being jumbled with all the stuff on the plate. That is the real value of an agency, in addition to driving more conversions. But you gotta make sure that you're holding them accountable based on what the goals are of the organization and and the metrics to say, hey, I'm gonna hold you accountable. This we are we are measuring sales. That is it, right? And and

I think about this because I can remember back in the day for a couple of the teams that I worked with that the greatest agencies, the best agencies that we had became strategic partners. Because that's where the relationship really changes. The best agencies don't just run ads, send reports, and build graphics and what have you. They become strategic partners. They come to you and challenge assumptions, they bring ideas, they identify blind spots, they help you connect your marketing to revenue.

The best agency relationships feel collaborative, not transactual, because ultimately the goal isn't just go ahead and run some ads. The goal is, hey, I need to sell more tickets and grow my fan base. That's what a great agency is all about. If everything else is just a tactic, well then, hey, like that's not very collaborative. But if they're bringing things to you and saying, hey, did you notice this? Here's another way to approach this.

can you should probably add some more things to your group offerings or hey with this theme night this might work better and here's why like they're being collaborative. All right, at the end of each episode, I'm gonna share with you the main takeaways. These are the main takeaways from this episode. Number one, most teams evaluate agencies using the wrong metrics. Vanity metrics don't matter if revenue and the buyer quality don't improve.

Jeremy Neisser (11:04.386)
Buyer quality could be defined as your average order value, how many tickets they're purchased, a lot of different things. But vanity metrics don't matter if revenue and buyer quality do not approve. Marketing cannot fix broken operations, pricing, or even the fan experience. They amplify your problems. So marketing cannot fix broken operations pricing or fan experience.

Good agencies reduce chaos and create clarity. The best agencies help you understand your business better, not just run ads. So if you're currently working with an agency and you have some metrics here and you're asking yourself, what are we actually measuring? Are you evaluating impressions or real business impact?

If you got questions and you wanna, hey, grab 30 minutes and take a look at some of the reports that your agency is sharing with you, and you just say, hey, like this isn't making a lickadaggon sense here. Like grab 30 minutes. Ha I'm gonna put a link in the show notes or on sportsmarketing machine.com. Grab 30 minutes. Happy to chat through it with you. I'd love to help.

Just to be able to just give you some clarity on what I see. It's no consult it's it's free, it's completely free. And like I I'm I'm on behalf of you. I just want you to sell more tickets and grow your fan base. I have no skin in the game. I really just want you to win. So if you'd like to pop one over sketch 30 minutes, happy to chat through it. And we can even talk through some of the metrics that I see and then then go from there. So if you found this episode helpful.

about how you think about your agencies that you're working with, marketing, measurement, all of those things. Feel free to share it with someone who's just like you, someone who's trying to sell more tickets and grow their fan base. Until next time.