What metrics should my agency track?
Six numbers, tracked weekly: gross income per head, utilisation rate, revenue concentration, income security (your mix of commercial models), scope variance, and client success attribution. The limit is deliberate. The discipline is in choosing what matters, not measuring everything. If your dashboard is full of activity metrics, hours logged, posts published, you're measuring busyness, not performance.
I've seen agencies that track twenty metrics and still can't tell you whether last month was good. The dashboard exists, but it's full of activity: hours logged, emails sent, social posts published. The team feels busy. Often they're complaining about being overworked. The reports look busy too. And nobody can explain how such a busy agency is losing money.
Measuring busyness is not measuring performance. Performance is gauged by effectiveness, not effort.
The six
Gross income per head. Revenue productivity per employee. It combines pricing quality, client mix and delivery efficiency in one number, and it drives resourcing decisions and hiring thresholds.
Utilisation rate. The share of available time spent on billable or directly attributable work. It exposes capacity waste and over-resourcing, and it's your early warning of margin pressure.
Revenue concentration. Your single largest client, and your top three combined, as a share of net revenue. This is your fragility measure. Monitor it monthly.
Income security. Your model mix: how much income is outcome-based and committed versus project-based and speculative. Committed income is more valuable and more predictable, and buyers price it at a premium.
Scope variance. Actual hours or cost delivered against quoted and contracted scope. The primary margin signal. Persistent over-delivery is a commercial discipline failure.
Client success attribution. Measurable outcomes delivered for clients, in their commercial language. The basis for renewals, rate rises and scope expansion conversations.
Track these weekly and you'll see problems forming early enough to act. Find them at period end and your options have already narrowed.
If you only track one
Gross income per head is the single most revealing number in an agency. It combines pricing quality, client mix, delivery efficiency and utilisation into one metric, and it's the most legible operational health number in any due diligence process.
The benchmarks: for marketing agencies, £90k to £120k per head is acceptable and above £120k is strong. For PR and consulting, £100k to £140k is acceptable and above £140k is strong. Below those ranges, something upstream is wrong: pricing, client mix, or delivery efficiency.
A warning about the data underneath
Your metrics are only as good as their inputs, and the weakest input in most agencies is the timesheet. Self-reported timesheets completed late get back-filled from memory and guesswork, which makes them fiction. My rule: unless timesheets are completed on an enforced daily cadence, don't base big decisions on them. Use them to track time against projects and keep people on the straight and narrow. But don't resign a "loss-making" client on the strength of made-up hours.