7 Ways to Increase Agency Efficiency in 2025

We’re officially at the starting line of 2025, and if your marketing agency is still clinging to outdated tools or inefficient internal processes, you won’t find many valid excuses left to use. Agency life is as competitive as ever. And if you intend to grow your clients’ business, not lose it, you ultimately need to implement every optimization and efficiency you can. 

From better onboarding to smarter reporting, today we’re sharing the most important avenues to increasing your agency’s efficiency in 2025 and beyond. 

Why Efficiency Is Critical To Stay In the Agency Game

Let’s be real. Many of us have felt this way before: I’m tired of hearing about efficiency! I already work fast. I don’t need to rush every part of my life.

Slowing down on a personal or individual level is a valid and healthy approach to take. But on an organizational level, it’s not a luxury that a fast-moving business like a successful agency can afford. Here’s why: 

• Competition Is Fierce: Countless other agencies, and even in-house teams, will threaten to take your business. You have no choice but to outpace and outperform them. 

• Client Expectations Are Higher Than Ever: The most valuable clients expect truly exceptional service. Inefficient and slow processes don’t allow for that. 

• AI Has Raised the Bar for Everyone: Whatever your opinion on generative AI in all its forms, it is profoundly, undeniably changing the digital marketing world. To compete with AI and increasingly refined AI-powered tools, it’s important to use the right systems yourself. 

So, if you expect your agency to still be flourishing a year (or a decade) from now, boosting your agency’s operational efficiency needs to be your top priority. 

Productivity Vs. Efficiency: Not the Same Measure

We’ve chosen this article’s focus word carefully here: efficiency. You may think productivity is the exact same thing, but there’s a crucial difference! 

Productivity refers purely to volume or quantity of work within a given timeframe. Writing 50 pages of marketing copy in one single night: now that’s productive! 

Efficiency, on the other hand, factors in quality and sustainability as well. 

As it turns out, those 50 pages of copy written last night were all caffeine-fueled nonsense; you’ll need to scrap it all and start over. The next night, you may determine you can write six pages of really great, usable copy instead. Now, that’s a repeatable, dependable ongoing process that makes the best use of your limited time and resources. 

That is agency efficiency. 

Efficiency Enhances Profitability

Ultimately, here’s your greatest incentive to put in the work: agency efficiency boosts profitability.

Often by a lot. In fact, some reports cite that companies lose up to 30% in revenue each year due to inefficiencies. 

Consider your agency’s Delivery Margin, which is calculated as the ratio of Delivery Cost to Agency Gross Income (AGI) on a given project or within set project timelines. Keeping Delivery Costs down is just as important as keeping your Agency Gross Income up. Delivery expenses are a silent killer. 

There are three clear levers to pull to improve your Delivery Margin. Increased efficiency makes each of them much easier to pull:

• Average Billable Rate: When was the last time you audited and optimized your billable rate? If you effectively reduce production time by finding faster and easier ways to deliver, it’ll have a direct effect on overall profitability. 

• Average Cost per Hour: How much are your team members costing you? And no, before you even think it, layoffs are not the best answer here. Rather, can you make better use of inexperienced or junior talent? Can you reevaluate any perks or benefits which employees aren’t currently leveraging? What does your resource allocation look like? 

• Utilization Rate: The difference between utilization vs. efficiency is subtle, but important. An employee may be very efficient, but not given the right focus or responsibilities to put that efficiency to the best use. A team member should be spending the majority of their working time on client work, even if in practice, that’s often not the case. Over time, the more efficient your employees, tools, and processes are, the more thoroughly you’ll align your team’s capacity with billable work. 

5 Agency Efficiency Metrics You Need to Track

Now that you’re sold on the value of streamlining agency efficiency, let’s discuss the metrics you should use to track how your agency’s operational efficiency improves with time. 

These five metrics are a fantastic place to start: 

Project Profitability

Use common recurring projects to track this. Say you designed a PPC ad for a client in May, then another similar ad for the same price in October. If you made 20% more profit on it in October without charging more, there’s a good chance that extra profit came from finding new efficiencies. 

Time To Complete Projects

This is a fun metric to get granular with. Let’s use the PPC ad example again. The ad your team designed in May was an 8-hour job, but the October ad only took 3 hours. If you implemented specific time-saving measures in between, try to determine how they could have contributed to this improvement, whether directly or indirectly. Good time tracking is, of course, necessary here. 

The most difficult thing to maintain efficiency for large-scale client portfolios is that there is a lot more to manage and it's easier for things to fall through the cracks. It’s so critical to have your project management dialed in, and to meet frequently with your team to make sure you're managing that client well.

Joshua Kimmes, Owner, Bear North Digital

Employee Turnover Rate

Yes, this is an efficiency metric, and an important one! Every employee that leaves an agency takes knowledge and expertise along with them. Hiring and onboarding a replacement requires significant resources, and could seriously damage workflows and team member dynamics. If you have a low employee turnover rate, take pride: not only are your employees satisfied, they’re also more likely to be productive. Stability enables efficiency on multiple levels. 

Revenue per Employee

Unless your agency is within a unique state of hypergrowth or in sudden decline, ideally you’re striving for a healthy and sustainable amount of revenue per employee. If you see this number going up over time, that may indicate the entire team is becoming faster and more efficient overall. 

Resource planning and strategy enable GCC Consulting to use its budget and resources more efficiently. By aligning resource allocation with strategic objectives, anticipating future demands, and proactively addressing challenges, GCC Consulting can maximize ROI and adapt quickly to changing circumstances, ultimately driving greater efficiency and effectiveness in achieving its goals.

Gia Ching, Managing Director, GCC Consulting

Cost per Acquisition

This important metric reveals the total cost required to obtain a new client. Hopefully, you’re always working to lower this number! If it’s decreasing at a faster rate, though, this suggests your client sales and onboarding strategy may have become more efficient. It goes without saying, but keep a close eye on your client retention rate here, too. 

7 Ways To Improve Operational Efficiency in 2025

With the setting, the motive, and the measurement now covered, let’s move on to the main course. Here are seven of the very best methods for you, as an agency owner or executive, to improve agency efficiency heading into the new year. 

1. Benchmark Against Industry Averages

Firstly, you may wonder: How do you even begin to set your new efficiency goals? Do your agency operations just need to be a little bit more efficient, or is it time to hit the panic button? When you’re on the inside, it’s often difficult to objectively gauge any of this. 

For example, if your agency's client lifespan is way below the industry average... that's a problem (and one that could be caused by inefficiency).

That’s why it helps to rely on impartial industry data, which doesn’t lie, whether the truth hurts or not. Benchmark client performance against their competitors, and it’ll show you very quickly whether you’re ahead of the game, barely keeping up, or already falling far behind.

When it comes to sensitive insights and benchmarking, it’s important to work with a partner you trust. Choose a provider which goes beyond the basics to offer a full suite of data solutions. The more insights at your disposal, the better you can make your biggest decisions. Information is power.

But these insights don't have to be solely focused on agency performance, efficiency also translates to client campaign performance. If you’re looking for that partner, AgencyAnalytics’ own insights features run the gamut: 

• Easily identify anomalies in your client data

• Monitor data trends and optimize your marketing strategy accordingly

• Forecast the future to set realistic performance goals

• And of course, benchmark your clients’ performance against industry standards

It’s never a bad idea to start here. Benchmarking and evaluating insights is the only viable data-driven way to understand how your agency is performing compared to those around you. 

This way, your agency will move forward with purpose, not stumble around in the dark.

Benchmark performance against competitors, forecast future predictions, and set alerts for anomalies with AgencyAnalytics! Try the new Insights features today by signing up for a free 14-day trial.

2. Streamline Client Onboarding

Stop us if this sentiment seems familiar, or if you’ve ever heard this said by a colleague: Our client onboarding is messy, but it doesn’t matter. Once we get through the first project, we’ll profit forever!

An agency’s client onboarding process is one of the most common places to find wasted time, effort, and money. If client onboarding is in any way incomplete, painful, or problematic at your agency, now’s the time to fix it. 

A solid onboarding protocol ensures internal efficiency, reduces the amount of follow-up, and shows the client you are organized and competent, increasing their trust and building rapport.

Will Goldfarb, CEO, Merkava Group

Set the record straight in your very first new client interactions. You’ll want to determine preferred communication methods, set roles and contact points, clarify expected timelines, and put it all in writing for easy cross-functional reference. Don’t wait until you have an urgent overnight project from the client to start asking them for basic details and resources. 

The best place to start is with a client onboarding questionnaire. 

This key project management process elevates the entire onboarding experience: 

• Ensures all critical information is captured. 

• Gleans information the client may have never shared otherwise.

• Signals quality and professionalism to the client. 

• Enables you to provide exceptional client satisfaction.

The benefits of a questionnaire are too clear to ignore. Download our Client Onboarding Questionnaire Template and transform your own onboarding experience right now. 

3. Establish Clear Client Goals (and Communicate Progress) 

Speaking of client onboarding, the work to stay on the same page as your client doesn’t stop there. It’s vital to regularly connect with long-term clients to reaffirm their goals and strategic approach.  

Understanding a project’s goals—and on a larger scale, the client’s entire strategic vision—is key to working efficiently. Creative execution, especially in core elements like information priority and call to action, relies on clearly understanding goals and desired outcomes. 

At the very least, misalignment often leads to massive scope creep and panicked, last-minute calls to get clarity. In an especially bad situation, misinterpreting the intended focus of a campaign could mean starting over entirely, at cost. Or worse, losing the client forever.

On the other hand, when your agency and the client are confidently aligned on goals and able to track progress, everyone is happier. 

We start by setting realistic and achievable goals with our clients. By clearly defining expectations upfront, we align on the desired outcomes and timelines while ensuring that quality remains a priority.

Omar Muñoz, Co-Founder, REInvestor SEO

The time you save by understanding and documenting goals from the start should be leveraged to proactively keep your client updated on project progress. Communicating regular updates and milestones makes it easier for a client to continue advocating for your agency and giving you more business. 

Good agency project management processes enable both efficiency and great client service. 

Need a fast, easy way to record goals and automatically report on their progress? AgencyAnalytics’ own annotations and goals features do just that. Give your clients all the pertinent details in crystal-clear data visualizations, all without extra work on your part–sign up for your free 14-day trial!

4. Improve Client Communication

Agency-client communication has evolved a lot, but especially in the last decade or so. The days of lengthy, polite emails with hours between replies are long over. Details change fast and your clients have lots to say, so your communication channels should be seamless, speedy, and accessible. 

In practice, at least. The reality is, even in the era of voice memos and iMessage, many agencies still rely on ancient communication standards. Outdated modes of communication sabotage both your efficiency and your core relationships with clients. 

Your agency tech stack should include a modern messaging solution. When you enable (and train) clients to share that latest round of changes as a chat message or written brief instead of in a meeting, you’re saving hours of time for every member of your team. Then, if you have existing processes in place, key team members can ask relevant questions and get clarification without needing to make it an event. 

The best way to make communication easy is to set up messaging integrations that connect with your existing platforms. This way, you (and your clients) completely avoid needing to learn any brand new systems. Your agency tech stack is safe.

Integrations like these get everyone out of their Teams calls and email inboxes by creating a perfect throughline for connection. Instant, simple, flexible—the potential impact of better communication standards really can’t be overstated. 

Looking for seamless client communication with unlimited user accounts, built-in support, and live custom dashboards? AgencyAnalytics integrates with agency project management tools and client messaging tools including HubSpot, Intercom, Zendesk, and HelpScout to make your client messaging intuitive. Message received.

5. Leverage AI

AI’s speedy evolution is polarizing for many. But like it or not, you do actually need to use AI tools to stay competitive in 2025. Thankfully, it’s not as difficult or intimidating as you think. 

If you haven’t been keeping up with the breakneck speed of the generative AI wave, you may feel like you need to learn an entire language to understand AI. Rest assured, that’s really not the case! Incorporating just one or two AI-powered efficiency tools into your marketing processes will genuinely make all the difference for your entire team’s raw output. 

Once the right AI tools are properly configured, they’ll do the work for you. Instantly, repetitive tasks–like gathering insights for reporting–are solved with the right AI tool. That saved time then goes back into your team’s pool to spend on a different task instead. That’s agency efficiency at its finest. 

AgencyAnalytics’ own AI reporting tools do all this and more. Ask AI and AI Summary simplify reporting, so you spend more time strategizing and less time analyzing.

• Ask AI: Whether you’re spotting trends, uncovering opportunities, or celebrating wins, Ask AI quickly delivers clear, easy-to-understand takeaways. Use our four prompts, or ask a question of your own.

• AI Summary: Gather a quick snapshot of your client’s progress during the most recent period with an AI Summary. Generate a high-level overview in seconds and drag it directly into your reports or dashboards, saving time while delivering professional, actionable insights.

6. Generate Smart Reports To Reduce Reporting Time

Speaking of automation tools and reporting: are you (or is someone at your agency) still building manual client reports from scratch, or from “templates” that barely make a difference? There’s a massive time sink right there, and just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s still the fastest or best method. Far from it.

At this point, you may compare building a manual report to doing long division on a sheet of looseleaf instead of using a calculator. It’s important to know how to do it and why it works, sure, but if it’s part of your day to day operations, you’re just wasting your time. 

Using automated reporting tools like smart reporting dashboards with real-time data and instant, drag-and-drop modules is not only going to improve your agency’s operational efficiency: it’ll knock the socks off your clients too. 

AgencyAnalytics’ one-click Smart Reports are generated in just 11 seconds, based on a client’s specific connected integrations. They follow best practices and tried-and-true reporting patterns, they’re incredibly easy to customize, and they’re visually stunning to boot. 

7. Monitor Every Platform From One Interface

Often, achieving an efficient agency operations workflow boils down to finding the simplest, easiest, cleanest way to get the information you need, so you can act on it faster. Every moment spent navigating to a new platform or information source requires a mental shift which interrupts deep, focused work. Efficiency requires momentum. 

Although we live and work within a complex ecosystem with seemingly infinite apps, services, and platforms to juggle, that doesn’t mean you need to have infinite browser tabs open to access it all. 

Here’s a great tip, and it might be the fastest and easiest one on this list for you to action right now: set up one single clean, beautiful interface, and use integrations to monitor every single platform you need from that one place. 

AgencyAnalytics offers 80 integrations with platforms across the web, ranging from the biggest players to the most niche. Chances are high that every platform you regularly use integrates nicely with AgencyAnalytics’ all-in-one data visualization platform. 

Do yourself a massive favor: collect everything in one place. Enable everyone else at your agency to do the same. That time taken each day, hunting around for every little bit of information you need, adds up fast. Integrations are the smart solution. 

In Conclusion: Efficiency Is King

In the end, every agency is different, so only you can decide where and how to make improving agency efficiency your mission. That said, increasing efficiency with things like a streamlined reporting tool will absolutely have a proven, demonstrable effect on your bottom line. 

Of the tactics mentioned in this article, we recommend starting with two or three that resonate with you most. Commit to them, follow change management best practices, and track your metrics over a long enough time period to see the results bear out. Improving agency efficiency doesn’t happen overnight. It takes hard work, fostered by individual and collective accountability. 

If you take anything away from this article, and you want to make this process fast and easy, then here’s the truth: partnering with AgencyAnalytics solves all of this for you. Better profitability, happier clients, and a streamlined workflow starts right here. 

• Instantly generate customized, white labeled reports. 

• Get data-driven recommendations in minutes.

• Leverage 80 marketing integrations, including HubSpot and Semrush.

• Access profoundly helpful insights, industry trends, and benchmarking.

Ready to embrace efficiency? Try AgencyAnalytics now and reclaim your team’s time and profitability. It’s free to try for 14 days.