Methodology
How the Power Ranking is determined. And what cannot move it.
The PBA Power Ranking orders listed agencies by what verified clients have actually said about them. This page explains how, plainly enough to be checked and held to.
What the ranking does
It measures verified client reviews, and nothing else
The only input is reviews from people confirmed to have been clients of that agency. Not traffic, not follower counts, not how long an agency has been listed, not how much it pays us.
Rating counts for more than volume
An agency with a higher average rating generally places above one with more reviews and a lower average. This is deliberate. Review counts accumulate with age, so ranking by volume would produce a seniority list that a newer agency could never climb no matter how good its work was.
A rating has to be supported before it counts fully
A perfect average across a handful of reviews is weaker evidence than a strong average across many, so a rating is weighted toward the directory-wide average until enough reviews accumulate to support it. As real reviews come in, an agency's own average carries progressively more of its score. Five glowing reviews do not vault an agency over one with thirty excellent ones, and thirty mediocre reviews do not hold a place at the top.
Too few reviews means unranked, not ranked last
Below a small minimum there is not enough signal to place an agency at all, so it is listed as unranked. An agency is never assigned a position it has not earned, in either direction. Being unranked is not a negative judgment.
It recalculates on its own
The ranking is recomputed automatically as verified reviews change. Nobody adjusts positions by hand, and there is no editorial override.
What has no effect on rank
None of the following changes an agency's position, at all, in any direction:
- Paying for a Professional or Featured Partner plan
- Being a Featured Partner, or appearing at the front of the directory
- Being the founder listing
- How long an agency has been listed
- Agency size, revenue, or client count
- Anything an agency writes about itself
- Any relationship with Mashman Consulting Group
Plan revenue funds the free vetting review. It buys placement in the directory and presentation on a listing. It does not touch this ranking, and it never will, because a leaderboard that can be bought is an advertisement wearing a leaderboard's clothes.
Protecting it from manipulation
Reviews are verified before they count
Every review requires a working contact email and is confirmed with the reviewer before publication. A review we cannot verify never publishes and never affects a rank. This is the part that actually protects the ranking.
A person reads every review
Nothing publishes automatically. See how reviews are verified for the full process.
Manipulation is an ethics violation
Soliciting reviews from non-clients, writing your own, or arranging them through third parties breaches the Code of Ethics. Confirmed cases end the listing permanently, which also ends the rank.
Delisted agencies leave the ranking immediately
An agency removed from the directory is removed from the ranking on the same build.
What is not published here, and why
The principle above is the whole of the method, and it is published so that anyone can check whether the ranking behaves the way we say it does. What is not published is the precise arithmetic: the exact weighting constant, the exact minimum, and the specific patterns that flag a set of reviews for closer scrutiny.
That is not to keep the method mysterious. It is because those numbers are the only part an agency could act on rather than earn. Publishing the exact threshold turns a measure of client satisfaction into a target to hit, and publishing the fraud heuristics tells anyone willing to manufacture reviews exactly how to stay under them.
The integrity of this ranking does not rest on that arithmetic being secret. It rests on every review being tied to a real, contactable client. Someone who knows the formula perfectly still cannot move a position without genuinely satisfied clients willing to put their names to it, which is the only thing we ever wanted the ranking to measure.