Hi there - author of article here. The problem for them was mainly that the agency running their ad account counted "demo requests" as their top metric and mist

Hi there - author of article here. The problem for them was mainly that the agency running their ad account counted "demo requests" as their top metric and mistakingly counted all demo requests that came in as attributed to the marketing spend. So they reported on faulty numbers during the entire year. Hubspot showed that direct ads actually didn't work at all (mainly because they didn't really have PMF yet). Needless to say, that agency got fired pretty quickly. I've realised I might have to write a separate post just about this specific incident and what we did to bring the spend and results back on track. Thanks!