The Moving Goalpost
Six months in, you bring up the targets from the original proposal. The ones that got you excited enough to sign. The agency listens patiently, then explains that the market has shifted, the platform algorithm changed, your competitive landscape is more crowded than anticipated, and frankly, those initial projections were always ambitious.
The goalposts have moved. Quietly, without a conversation, and always in the direction that makes the agency look less accountable.
How It Works
The Moving Goalpost is what happens when the targets set at the start of an engagement become inconvenient — and instead of addressing the gap between promise and performance, the agency reframes what success was supposed to look like.
It usually happens gradually. The initial pitch contains bold projections: leads, rankings, traffic growth, revenue impact. The contract gets signed. Work begins. Early results are mixed. The agency stays upbeat, talks about building momentum, emphasizes that marketing takes time. Months pass.
At some point — maybe in a quarterly review, maybe just in how the monthly reports are framed — the original targets stop coming up. The conversation shifts to what’s happening now rather than how it compares to what was promised. New metrics emerge. The benchmark changes from where you were supposed to be to some other reference point that looks better.
By the time you notice, you’ve been in a relationship you can’t easily exit, with results that are hard to evaluate against anything concrete, and a vague sense that things aren’t going the way you hoped but no clean way to say why.
Here’s what Moving Goalpost looks like up close:
The reframe. “We know we talked about X leads per month, but what we’ve found is that lead quality matters more than volume — and the leads we’re driving are high-quality.” Maybe. Or maybe lead volume is down and this is a way to avoid that conversation. How are you measuring lead quality? What’s the data?
The external attribution. Results are below target because of algorithm changes, market conditions, increased competition, seasonality, or some other external factor. These things are real. They happen. But they’re also convenient, because they shift accountability away from the agency and onto forces outside anyone’s control. Ask: what did we change in our approach in response to these conditions?
The extended timeline. “Marketing is a long game. We’re building something sustainable here, and you’ll start to see the compound effects over the next few months.” This is sometimes true. It’s also a way to keep pushing the promised results just far enough into the future that the contract renews before they have to materialize.
The pivot. The original strategy isn’t working, so the agency recommends a new direction — often one that involves additional spend or a new service line. The original targets quietly disappear in the transition. You’re now evaluating the new initiative rather than asking why the first one didn’t deliver.
How to Spot It
The clearest sign of a Moving Goalpost is when you bring up the original targets and the conversation shifts away from them rather than toward them.
A good agency will proactively compare current results to original projections — including when the news is bad. They’ll explain the gap honestly, tell you what they’re changing, and give you a revised view of what to expect and when. That’s accountability. What you don’t want is an agency that only references the original targets when they were exceeded.
Other signals:
The deck has no “vs. target” column. Every good performance report should compare current results against agreed targets, not just against the previous period or some other benchmark. If that comparison is absent, ask for it explicitly.
You’re being asked to evaluate the work on new criteria. If the agency starts introducing metrics or success criteria that weren’t in the original brief, ask why. Sometimes it’s legitimate — goals evolve, businesses change. But it should be an explicit conversation, not a quiet substitution.
The contract renewal conversation happens before the results conversation. If the agency is focused on renewing before they’ve given you a clear-eyed account of whether they hit their targets, that sequencing is deliberate.
How to Protect Yourself
Get the targets in writing before work begins. Not in a proposal deck that never gets referenced again — in the contract, or in a signed scope document that both parties treat as binding. Targets should be specific, measurable, and time-bound. “Improve SEO performance” is not a target. “Increase organic search traffic to the website by 30% within six months” is a target.
Schedule a formal mid-engagement review. At the halfway point of any engagement, sit down and compare results to targets honestly. If things are off-track, what’s the plan? If the plan requires changing the targets, that should be an explicit, documented conversation — not something that happens by default because nobody brought up the original numbers.
Own the original proposal. Keep a copy of everything the agency sent you before the contract was signed — especially the projections and the case studies they used to support them. Reference them periodically. If the agency pitched you based on specific outcomes and those outcomes aren’t materializing, you’re entitled to ask why directly.
Build a performance clause if you can. Some agency contracts include performance benchmarks with consequences — reduced fees, exit rights, or additional services at no charge if targets aren’t met. These are more common in larger engagements, but there’s nothing stopping you from asking for them in a smaller one. An agency confident in their ability to deliver won’t balk at being held to it.
The Moving Goalpost is one of the most frustrating techniques in this series because it exploits something reasonable — the genuine uncertainty of marketing results — to avoid accountability for something specific: the promises that got you to sign.
Marketing does take time. Algorithms do change. Markets do shift. But these realities don’t mean that targets are suggestions, or that accountability is optional. They mean both parties need to be honest about what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change.
That conversation should happen proactively. If you’re always the one initiating it, something’s wrong.
