Channel optimisation is one of the most ingrained rituals in marketing. It feels productive. It creates clear wins to report. It gives teams a sense of progress when revenue isn’t moving.

But channel optimisation doesn’t address why revenue isn’t moving. What works for a mature business - with stable unit economics, predictable conversion, and a proven system - doesn’t work for a company still figuring out where growth actually comes from.

That mismatch quietly drives bad behaviour: celebrating metric improvements that don’t move revenue, doubling down on channels that look efficient in isolation, and ignoring the system-level constraints that actually limit growth.

Why Channel Optimisation Fails (and the Bad Behavior It Creates)

Marketers and leadership teams have a bias towards things that are easy to measure. Cost per click, cost per lead, conversion rate by source. Platforms give you these numbers. Not because they’re important to you, but because they’re somewhat useful to everyone.

Sometimes the platforms are also acting as both player and referee. It’s salivating for teams to see revenue attributed towards something when, in reality, it was barely a nudge in the customer journey.

One of the most ostentatious examples of this was Drift. Drift was a chatbot that integrated with your website and made a huge splash with its marketing in the late 2010s. But they would also display a metric called Drift Influenced Revenue, and assign themselves the revenue value of any closed own deal with a Drift interaction. But what exactly constituted a Drift interaction? Many people replaced their lead gen forms with it. It was tenuous at best, deceptive at worst.

But these numbers become seductive. It’s easy to look important to an organisation when you can say your initiatives are responsible for millions in revenue. But in isolation, these initiatives rarely move the needle toward improving the system overall.

People fail to understand just how small a piece of the pie they have improved is. A ten per cent improvement in cost per lead on a channel that drives five per cent of the pipeline isn’t meaningful progress. It’s noise that feels productive.

Imagine Dave. He’s in the first-class kitchen, tightening a dripping tap.

He finishes the job, wipes his hands, and files a report: “Fixed leak in Kitchen 3. Saving an estimated 10 litres per day. Recommend we roll this approach out across all kitchens.”

His manager is delighted. Slaps him on the back. Clear problem. Measurable fix. Nice before-and-after numbers. Dave gets a mention in the weekly update.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic Ocean is rising through E Deck. The ship has hit an iceberg. Water is pouring through a gash in the hull at roughly 7 tonnes per second.

Marketers and leadership all too often fail to see that they’re in the sinking ship business when they think they’re in the leaking tap business.

When marketing isn’t delivering, it’s rarely a leaking tap. It’s almost always a system problem. Demand generation, conversion, or customer value creation isn’t working as expected somewhere in the chain. Optimising a part of a channel while the system is broken doesn’t fix it. It just makes the reporting look better while the real constraint persists.

The Forest for the Trees

I think the reason this happens is because marketers simply don’t understand what the role of marketing is. Channel management became synonymous with marketing, and a lot of the broader understanding was lost. In more recent years, we’ve started looking at marketing more holistically again. But still, that kind of thinking is on the fringes of the profession.

For me, the job of marketing is to maximise customers acquired without breaking the customer acquisition cost or payback. Everything else is secondary. The more customers we acquire, the more revenue we generate, the more experiences to create referrals, the less marketshare for competitors, the flywheel persists until a unicorn is created.

But that’s not how teams operate day to day. They report on what’s visible, measurable, and defensible in isolation. They mistake activity for progress and optimisation for strategy. They lack the urgency and focus needed to create impact. Over time, this creates a culture where effort increases, but confidence - and results - does not.

The most harmful behaviour isn’t inefficiency. It’s a lack of awareness about how the system fits together.

It also limits what you can do as a marketer.

I spoke with a company recently who were making a big bet on an untrackable event. Sponsorship, brand, the kind of thing that makes performance marketers uncomfortable. But when you ran their yearly numbers - took that spend out, put that spend in - it didn’t actually make a difference to their blended economics. They could make big bets confidently because they understood the system well enough to know what mattered and what didn’t.

That kind of freedom only comes from thinking at the system level.

Think in Systems, Not Channels

The answer isn’t abandoning channel metrics. It’s changing how you use them.

Instead of asking “how do we improve this channel,” start with “what’s actually constraining total customers acquired?”

Usually it’s one of three things: demand generation isn’t creating enough qualified opportunities, demand conversion isn’t turning opportunities into revenue at expected rates, or customer value isn’t delivering the outcomes that drive retention and expansion to create favourable CAC:ACV measures.

Everything else is downstream of these. If demand generation is the constraint, optimising conversion rates won’t help. If conversion is broken, more leads won’t help. If customers aren’t getting value, nothing upstream matters.

Find the constraint. Fix the constraint. Then push.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Pace

Most companies I work with are not aggressive enough about acquiring customers when their economics allow it.

When the blended model works - when payback is acceptable and cash flow supports it - acquiring customers aggressively is often the correct strategy. Paid channels are allowed to look expensive in isolation because the system as a whole becomes more efficient over time.

But teams optimising individual channels don’t see this. They see a channel with high CPL and try to fix it. They don’t see that the channel is doing exactly what it should within a system that works.

Under-investment isn’t neutral. Every customer you don’t acquire reduces your market position and leaves space for competitors to fill. Slow, cautious growth that looks responsible quarter to quarter can quietly become the most expensive strategy of all.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Stop leading with channel performance in reporting. Lead with your quarter-on-quarter funnel and blended unit economics. Then drill into channels as diagnostics, not scorecards.

When something isn’t working, resist the urge to optimise the thing you can measure. Step back and ask where the system is actually constrained.

Pre-agree on what “working” looks like at the system level. What would you need to see to push harder? What would cause you to slow down and investigate? Make these decisions with a clear head, not in the middle of a bad quarter.

And remember: you’re probably not going to sell the company this year. When you do, no one will care whether your LinkedIn CPL was twelve per cent better in Q2. They’ll care whether you acquired customers at economics that compounded into a durable market position.