How to tell whether your marketing is actually working
The most common complaint we hear about marketing is not that it failed. It is that nobody can tell. Reports arrive full of impressions, reach and engagement, the business owner nods, and the honest question — is this earning its keep? — goes unanswered for another month.
You do not need to become an analyst. You need four numbers and one habit.
The four numbers
1. Enquiries, counted the same way every month
Not traffic. Enquiries: forms, calls, messages, quote requests. The absolute number matters less than counting it consistently, because the trend is the signal and a changing definition destroys the trend.
2. Cost per enquiry
Everything you spent on marketing that month, divided by enquiries. Include the agency fee, the ad spend and the tools. One number, and it makes channels comparable for the first time.
3. Enquiry-to-customer rate
What proportion of enquiries become paying work. This is where most businesses find their real problem: the marketing is producing enquiries and the follow-up is losing them. That is cheaper to fix than buying more traffic.
4. What a customer is worth
Not the first invoice — everything they spend over the relationship, including repeat work. Without this you cannot know what an enquiry is worth, and without that you cannot know whether your cost per enquiry is good or terrible.
The habit: ask every enquiry how they found you
One question, asked every time, recorded somewhere. It is imperfect — people misremember, and someone who found you through a search may say “a friend” because a friend mentioned you first. But over a few months a pattern emerges that no analytics tool can give you, because it captures the offline half.
This one habit tells you more than most dashboards.
What to ignore
- Impressions and reach. Being displayed is not being noticed.
- Followers. A number that only moves upward and never appears on a bank statement.
- Bounce rate, in isolation. Someone who read your opening hours and left got exactly what they came for.
- Rankings, in isolation. Position one for a phrase nobody searches is worth nothing.
- Total traffic. Useful as context, misleading as a target.
How long before you judge it
Different channels answer at different speeds, and judging them all on a month is how good work gets cancelled early.
- Paid search: weeks. If it is not producing enquiries within a month or two, something is wrong.
- SEO: months. Six is a fair first review, and the compounding shows later.
- Email: immediately, per send.
- Social: slowly, and mostly as an assist rather than a direct source.
The one-page report
Enquiries this month. Cost per enquiry. How many became customers. Where they said they came from. What we changed. What we are changing next.
If your reporting does not answer those six things, it is decoration. We have a companion piece on the five numbers every small business should watch if you want the website-side view.
This is how we report on the marketing we run — plain English, monthly, and honest when something is not working. Book a call if you would like a second opinion on what you are being shown now.