Southern Tide Media Sample notes

This is a sample with illustrative data. The business below is fictional and the session never happened — any resemblance to a real company is coincidence. This is the shape of what arrives after a consulting session: what you asked, what was decided, what we ruled out and why, and what we could not settle.

Session Notes

Pelican Point Outfitters (fictional example) · 90 minutes · 14 August 2026 · billed 1.5 hours at $150/hour · nothing renews

What you booked the hour for

“We spend about $4,000 a month across Google and Facebook and I genuinely cannot tell you whether it works. Do we need to hire someone, switch agencies, or stop advertising altogether?”

Written down in your words, at the top, because by the end of ninety minutes everybody has quietly drifted to a different question. This is the one you paid to answer.

The short answer

None of the three, yet — because none of them can be judged on the information currently available. Your Google Ads conversion action last recorded a booking in March. Every optimization decision since has been made on a signal that had stopped, which means the honest answer to “does it work” is that nobody can currently tell, including your agency. That is a repairable problem and it is cheaper than any of the three options you came in with.

It does not mean the money has been wasted. Automated bidding fell back to a weaker signal rather than to none at all. It means the last five months of reporting describe something other than what you think they describe, and one clean month will tell you more than another five will.

What we decided

1. Fix the tracking before changing anything else

Re-point the conversion action at the booking system's confirmation callback rather than the thank-you page that changed address in March, pass the deposit value with it, and reconcile a full month against the booking system before drawing any conclusion at all.

Owner: us · quoted separately · by 29 August

2. Do not switch agencies yet

Switching now restarts the learning period and destroys the only before-and-after comparison available to you. There may still be a case for it — but in November, with two reconciled months in hand, it would be an argument rather than a hunch. Ask them for a dated list of what they actually did last month in the meantime; the answer is informative either way.

Owner: you · revisit 3 November

3. Pause the retargeting set, leave prospecting alone

You are retargeting an audience of about 900 people at this spend level, which means buying the same people repeatedly and calling the result efficiency. The prospecting campaigns are doing the actual work and should not be touched during the repair, so the comparison month stays clean.

Owner: us · by 22 August

4. Do not hire a marketing manager this year

At $4,000 a month in media, the role cannot pay for itself — the salary would be several times the budget it manages. The bottleneck you described in this session was that inquiry emails sit for two or three days before anyone replies. That is an operations fix, it costs nothing, and it will do more for bookings this season than a hire would.

Owner: you · no date set

What we ruled out, and why

Ruled outA rebrand. Nothing in the numbers points at the brand — the inquiries that do arrive convert perfectly well. This would be an expensive way to avoid the tracking problem.
Ruled outMoving to a new booking platform. The current one is unglamorous and works. Replacing it would consume the year's budget and fix nothing that was raised today.
Not from usBlog content at volume. You already hold a strong local position and the honest next dollar is the tracking fix. If you still want it in six months, an in-house writer is cheaper than we are — and we would rather say that now than sell it to you.
Agreed, no changeLeave the Google Search campaigns running exactly as they are through the repair. Changing two things at once means learning nothing from either.

The third one is the reason this section exists. We sell execution, so a recommendation to buy content somewhere cheaper costs us money — which is exactly why it belongs in writing rather than in a conversation nobody can recall in March.

Still open

Deposit or full trip value

Nobody in the room knew which should be passed as the conversion value. You are checking with the bookkeeper. It changes the cost-per-booking figure materially, so it needs settling before the November review.

The paper diary

Desk bookings are written on paper and are invisible to every system. Until that changes, any channel comparison understates walk-in and phone demand by an unknown amount — and “unknown” is the honest word, not a number we could estimate for you.

Next session

Not booked, and nothing renews. Call if the November review needs a second read, or if the tracking fix throws up something you would like an opinion on.

What you keep

This document, permanently, in a format you can forward — including to another agency, without asking us. There is no obligation to hire us for the tracking fix; the paragraphs above are specific enough for your own developer to work from, and that is deliberate. Nothing here has been held back to make you call, and there is nothing to cancel: no retainer, no notice period, no standing arrangement that renews itself.

Every consulting session produces notes in this shape, written by whoever sat in the session — not a transcript and not a proposal. If a session turns into work you would like us to do, it gets quoted in writing at the $95/hour production rate first. Related: the audit findings sheet and a sample measurement plan.

Get your AI Growth Snapshot