Why marketing analytics for service businesses might be a fundamentally different product

Spent the last week talking to four agency owners about the same question: do your clients actually use your dashboards?

Universally: no.

But the conversation that followed was more interesting than the data point itself. What I'm hearing across the agency world:

→ Reports are a billing artifact. They prove work is being done. They're not really for the client.

→ The "client portal with live dashboards" trend of 2018-2022 was largely a checkbox feature. Tools sold it. Clients didn't use it. Both sides knew.

→ Almost every agency that retained big SMB clients did so by inserting a human (an AM, a strategist) between the data and the action.

→ The agencies that scaled best were the ones that turned the human-in-the-loop into a templated set of recommendations.

The thread connecting all of this: the actual product the client buys isn't visibility. It's confidence in the next decision.

Visibility is a means. Recommendation is the end. The entire SaaS analytics category has built tools around the means.

If I'm right, the gap isn't "we need better dashboards." It's "the dashboard frame is wrong for this segment." What service businesses want is closer to a CFO meeting than a Tableau workspace.

I'm sitting on a list of ~20 specific behavior patterns I think a tool should automate to deliver "recommendation, not visibility." Not building anything yet. Still validating whether the agency owners I've talked to represent the broader market.

Curious if any IH folks selling SaaS into SMBs (especially through agencies) have data on actual dashboard usage. Are end-clients logging in? How often? What do they do when they log in? Honest order-of-magnitude numbers very welcome.