The evidence

eBay switched off the ads on its own name across a third of America, and 99.5 percent of the paid clicks came back through the free results. Before a dollar goes to ads, know which customers were coming anyway. Decision 08 in the field document is built on this experiment.

About 95 of every 100 buyers in a long-cycle market are not shopping this quarter. The ads they see now decide whose name comes to mind when they are ready, which is why visibility compounds and last-minute advertising does not.

An ad buys attention, and everything downstream of it decides whether that attention becomes money. Six steps at eighty percent leaves you twenty-six percent of what the same budget could have produced, and fixing one of them is worth about seven points.

People judge a page in a twentieth of a second, and one strong image seen once is recognized months later. A look held for years becomes an asset. A rebrand starts that clock back at zero. Decisions 01 and 02 in the field document rest on this evidence.

More than three quarters of executives say something they read led them to research a firm they had not been considering, and only fifteen percent rate what they read as very good. A page is built for one moment. A document travels into the room you are not in.

Firms that try to reach a new lead inside the hour are nearly seven times likelier to qualify it than firms one hour slower. Speed is a process decision, not a budget one, and most firms take days. Decision 05 in the field document.

Across 13,300 executive forecasts, ranges the forecasters were 80 percent sure of contained reality 36 percent of the time. A target built from weekly activity beats one defended by conviction, and it shows you the shortfall months earlier.

Six things cause it, and the fix for each one is different. Four are choices made before anybody filled anything in. The fifth is how fast somebody replied. The sixth is that they were coming anyway.