About
A consultancy built around measurement, not opinion
We started from one observation: businesses rarely have a marketing talent problem. They have a measurement problem that looks like one. Everything about how we work follows from fixing that first.
The problem we exist to solve
Most businesses do not have a marketing talent problem. They have a measurement problem that presents as a talent problem.
When nobody can establish which activity produced a customer, every decision becomes an argument about preference. The loudest voice wins the budget, the most confident person sets the strategy, and results are attributed retrospectively to whoever needs them most. Agencies are rarely the cause — they are frequently the environment in which this happens.
Carter & Crawley was built around a simple constraint: no recommendation gets made until we can state what it is supposed to change, and how we would know whether it did.
The five principles we work by
Revenue, not activity
Impressions, posts published and emails sent are outputs. We report on what those outputs produced, in euros if possible.Subtraction is the senior move
The most valuable recommendation in most audits is stopping something. Cutting a channel or a tactic frees budget that was never going to return.Say when it did not work
A consultancy that only reports wins is not measuring. We will tell you when a change underperformed and why we think it did.Independence
We do not resell media, software or services. We have no commission to steer you toward a tool and no margin to inflate a recommendation.Why independence is the whole product
The internet marketing industry has an unusual structural problem: the people recommending tools and services frequently earn money from the recommendation. Affiliates get a percentage. Agencies resell inventory at a markup. Platforms offer "partner" certification that is really a discount on their own pricing.
This is not a criticism of any individual. It is a structural incentive, and structure beats intention. We have no affiliate relationships with any tool we recommend, we do not buy media on your behalf, and we do not resell software. If the right answer is "you do not need us", that is a legitimate and recurring outcome of our work.
How we work with clients
Most of our work is delivered remotely, in writing, and asynchronously by default. That suits businesses in any timezone and keeps the overhead low enough that our rates stay reasonable.
What an engagement looks like
- Enquiry and first call (30 minutes, free). We ask about your business model, your margins, your sales process and what has already been tried. You will get a straight answer on whether we can help.
- Paid diagnostic (one to three weeks). We audit your analytics, site, competitive set and tracking. You receive a written report with a prioritized roadmap — yours to keep and act on, with or without us.
- Ongoing work (monthly or project-based). Either we implement, or your team implements and we specify. Which one is right depends entirely on whether you have capable in-house capacity.
- Reporting. Monthly, written, leading with what changed. We do not send decks that could have been sent unchanged from last month.
Where we are honest about fit
We are a poor fit for very early-stage companies with no revenue and no budget, for businesses unwilling to change anything based on the diagnosis, and for anyone seeking a guaranteed ranking. We will say so in the first call rather than the third invoice.
What we will not do
The list below is shorter than it should be, and every item on it has been offered to us by a client or a prospect at some point.
- Guarantee a specific ranking, traffic figure or revenue number. No legitimate practitioner can, and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or planning to invoice you for a technique that carries manual-action risk.
- Sell you links, guest posts or outreach through networks we own or pay for. This is the fastest way to a manual action, and we have watched clients undo months of work by accepting it.
- Use tactics we would not survive being audited on. If it would embarrass us to see it explained publicly, we do not do it.
- Report on vanity metrics to pad a deck. Impressions are not a result.
- Take on work in a regulated sector where we are not competent, or where the marketing claim would edge into a professional claim we are not qualified to make.
- Lock you into a twelve-month contract before either side has worked together once.
Our reasoning on the first and last of those is set out in how much SEO costs and how to choose an agency.
Where our expertise actually sits
We are strongest on the unglamorous parts of internet marketing, because that is where businesses lose the most money and where agencies are least helpful.
| Area | What we can usually fix | Typical time to first measurable change |
|---|---|---|
| Analytics accuracy | Broken or duplicated conversion tracking, GA4 misconfiguration, consent-mode gaps | 1–2 weeks |
| Technical SEO | Crawl waste, indexation blocks, canonical errors, Core Web Vitals failures | 3–8 weeks |
| AI search visibility | Extractability, entity clarity, citation-worthy evidence, crawler policy | 6–12 weeks |
| Paid media waste | Structure, negative keywords, conversion value modeling, budget misallocation | 2–6 weeks |
| Conversion rate | Form friction, offer clarity, landing page mismatch, checkout drop-off | 4–12 weeks |
| Lifecycle retention | Deliverability, segmentation, core automated flows | 6–16 weeks |
We are deliberately not a creative agency. We do not produce video at volume or run large-scale paid social production. Where a business needs that, we say so and suggest someone better.