Your ad report says last month was the best month you’ve had all year. Your bank account has not heard the news.

Both numbers are honest. They’re scoring different games.

Google built the scoreboard you’re reading. Clicks, impressions, click-through rate, cost per lead. Real numbers, every one. Also, every one of them improves when you send Google more money. Nobody had to cheat for that to be true. Whoever builds the scoreboard builds it around their own game.

Your game runs on different numbers. Booked jobs. Cost per booked job. What a customer is worth three years out. Whether the truck rolls to someone who can pay.

Here’s the part that costs you money. Both scoreboards can move at the same time, in opposite directions.

Watch it happen. Your cost per lead looks high, so you widen the keywords and pull the qualifying words out of the ad. Leads double. Cost per lead falls by half. On the dashboard, this is the best work anyone has done for you all year, and the person who did it has every right to be proud.

Now count what the dashboard can’t see. Your close rate drops from 60% to 20%. Your best estimator spends Tuesday and Wednesday writing quotes for people who were never going to buy. You book a third fewer jobs than last month, and you paid more to get them.

Cost per lead, down. Cost per booked job, up. The report has room for one of those.

Adel Al-Borky named this technoplasmosis. Rory Sutherland has been spreading the word since. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that rewires a rat’s brain so the rat walks toward the cat instead of away from it. The rat feels fine. The rat believes every decision it makes is its own.

A scoreboard you didn’t build works the same way, and it’s far easier to keep than to question. Consider who taught your ad manager the trade. Google runs the course, issues the certification, and writes the best-practice guide. The company selling you the media also trained the person buying it for you. Green numbers protect whoever hands them to you. Ask why the phone isn’t ringing with real work, and you’ll get a chart proving the clicks are cheap. Nobody is lying to you. They moved the number you asked them to move.

So change the number.

Before your next report, pick the one figure your business lives on. For most owners, it’s cost per booked job, and most owners have never seen it on a slide. Send it to whoever runs your ads and tell them it goes at the top of the page from now on. Not instead of their numbers. Above them.

Then sit through the first meeting. The people worth keeping will be relieved somebody finally asked. The rest will explain why that number is complicated.

You don’t have to stop measuring. You have to stop letting the other team keep score.

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