Marketing on Fire? Know When to Triage vs. Optimize

The team spent $2,000 in Google Ads every week and had nothing to show for it.

There was a hodge-podge of placements on just about any keyword that could have plausibly been a fit. Traffic was getting on the site, but not as much as you’d think and quote form submissions just weren’t coming through.

There was frustration and burnout and bewilderment besides. But also inertia: cutting the funnel with no replacement risks a freefall.

I hadn’t been on the project more than a few weeks when I shut off the ads entirely (with the hearty consent of the team, of course). Why light money on fire?

That decision came down to one thing: I knew we were in triage, not optimization.

Any marketer with a gray hair or two has been here before. It always comes down to one question…

Let’s define some terms real quick.

Triage is when you fix urgent, broken, or blocking systems. It’s time-sensitive, reactive, and the goal is stabilization. I’m specifically borrowing this term from emergency medicine because it’s a good metaphor for what you’re doing here. You might even call it “stabilizing care.”

Optimization is where you take a functioning system and you make it better. You line it up better with strategy, iterate on what already exists, and generally seek to improve. This is what you do when you A/B test, rewrite subject lines, tweak copy, and so on.

If you are burning money, having a reputational crisis, or your marketing engine has just suddenly stopped working properly and in a dramatic fashion, default to triage.

If your metrics are stable but suboptimal, performance is predictable, and there is nothing pressing, default to optimization.

If something is obviously broken, bleeding money, or tanking your company’s reputation, you have to do something fast. You don’t spend time debating over which metrics to improve when your website is 404ing.

If your ads are displaying the wrong landing page, cut them or set up a redirect to the right one. If your open rates are under 5% on emails, you have to start looking at DNS records. There’s just no point in overthinking it when that kind of problem is happening.

A few situations where triage would be best would be:

When you triage, perfection isn’t the goal—speed and clarity are. Your sole focus ought to be on what is actively hurting the business right now.

To triage well, your focus should be on fixing one or two high-impact problems as quickly as possible. And the whole time you do this, communicate with stakeholders so they feel involved, but don’t let them make panicked changes. Document your fixes as you go, even if you’re under a lot of pressure, because you’re going to need those notes later.

In a weird way, triage is glamorous because there is immediate payoff. But it’s also uncomfortable too, as well as necessary.

Triage is not a zone you want to stay in for long. You need to act fast so that you can get back into a cycle of proactivity rather than reactivity.

Optimization is what you do once the fires are out and the system is functioning. It’s your opportunity to move from "fine" to "excellent." The key word here is incremental. You’re making a good thing better, not reviving a dead channel.

Optimization is all about the necessary marketing work that really makes tremendous long-term impacts. I’m talking about the nuts-and-bolts stuff we all know we need to do, such as:

You know you’re ready for optimization when your performance is predictable (if not ideal), stable over time, and free of urgent issues or unexplained drop-offs.

With optimization, you act like a medical researcher and not a paramedic. You start with a clean baseline and reliable metrics. You test one variable at a time to isolate changes. And you track improvements and set benchmarks along the way.

Optimization calls for a slower, more methodical mindset. It’s about curiosity and iteration.

But again, while optimization is the zone you should stay in more often than not, it’s not always the answer. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of over-optimizing too early.

If the funnel is broken, A/B testing your subject line won’t fix it.

Once you have a little experience in marketing, or maybe business more broadly, you’ll have an intuitive feel for the difference between triage and optimization.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to know when to do which. Still, it’s risky to make the wrong choice.

If you optimize when you should be triaging, you might end up recoloring CTA buttons when your site just doesn’t work on mobile at all. Likewise, if you triage when you ought to optimize, you might cut off a perfectly good ad campaign that has room to go from a ROAS of 2.8 to 6. It’s a momentum-killer, not to mention a good way to burn trust with your team or client.

In an agency or consulting context, this gets even trickier. For clients who aren’t deep down the marketing rabbit hole—or just too slammed to think about marketing—it's hard to tell what's broken versus what’s just underperforming. They might start get uncomfortable when they hit a plateau or miss red flags entirely. That means it’s your job to diagnose correctly—and defend your recommendation.

Optimization done too soon wastes time. Triage done too late destroys trust. And you have to be aware of this asymmetry so you can make sure your decision-making process accounts for this.

I’ve framed this post as triage and optimization being a neat little dichotomy. Either/or.

Well, a lot of life in business is lived in that ever-messy middle. You could be plugging holes in a leaky funnel even as you tweak subject lines to boost open rates. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it wrong.

In the real world, these things bleed together. You might be fixing tracking issues (triage) while also rewriting your lead magnet to improve conversions (optimization). You might be rebuilding a broken email flow because the current one isn’t just underperforming—it’s broken. But at the same time, you’re testing variations on the timing and cadence. Is that triage? Optimization? Both.

Sometimes you work within constraints—like budget or stakeholder appetite—and optimize what you can while flagging deeper issues for later. Other times, you can’t afford to optimize yet because something core—like attribution or product-market fit—is still too broken to measure clearly. These are not bad decisions. They’re real, practical ones.

I’ve found that the trick is just being aware of where you are on the spectrum for the different things you are handling. Be honest about whether you’re fixing foundational problems, doubling down on performance, or doing both. That awareness changes how you report progress and how you prioritize your time.

If you're ever unsure whether you're triaging or optimizing, try this quick 3-minute test. It’s not perfect, but it helps clarify your next move:

If the answer to either is yes, you’re in triage. Stop everything else and fix the glaring issue.

If neither is true, ask:

If those are yes, you’re in optimization territory. The car runs, it just needs an oil change.

The trick, if you even want to call it that, is to keep asking which is more appropriate.

Conditions change fast. What starts as optimization can reveal triage needs underneath—and vice versa. This test is just a flashlight to help you direct your focus.

Most marketers are wired to jump into action. That’s because action feels really good and productive.

But what kind of action you take matters far more than how fast you move. If you rush to optimize while the house is burning, you’ll make it worse. If you triage what only needed a tune-up, you’ll kill momentum and burn trust.

Marketing success rarely comes from one clever idea. It comes from diagnosing your problems honestly, acting decisively, and knowing when to change your approach. That’s what keeps the whole machine running.

Triage saves what’s failing. Optimization grows what’s working.

Knowing the difference helps you take the right action at the right time.

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