Marketing reports are often full of numbers that are easy to collect and hard to act on: impressions, likes, followers and reach. They show activity, but they rarely tell a business owner the one thing they need to know: is our marketing bringing in customers at a sensible cost?
Here are the measures worth asking for, grouped by the question they answer.
Are we attracting the right people?
- Website visits by source. How many people arrive from search, social media, email, adverts and referrals. Changes in the mix tell you which channels are growing.
- Search visibility for your main services. Whether your site appears when people search for what you sell, and how many visits that brings.
Are they taking action?
- Enquiries or sales. Form submissions, calls, messages and purchases. This is the number most reports should start with.
- Conversion rate. The share of visitors to a key page who enquire or buy. A low rate on a page with plenty of traffic is often the cheapest problem to fix.
Are they the right enquiries?
- Lead quality. The share of enquiries that are a genuine fit. Your sales team can usually rate this quickly.
- Lead-to-customer rate. How many enquiries become paying customers, by source. A channel that brings fewer but better leads may be worth more than it looks.
Is it worth the money?
- Cost per lead for paid campaigns.
- Customer acquisition cost: total marketing spend divided by new customers in the same period.
- Return on marketing investment: revenue from marketing-sourced customers compared with what you spent to win them.
How to make the numbers useful
Track a handful of these consistently rather than all of them occasionally. Agree definitions with your team, so that an “enquiry” means the same thing every month. Make sure every form and call can be traced to its source, which usually means setting up analytics and conversion tracking properly before you start.
Most importantly, read the numbers as a trend. One month is noise; three to six months tells a story. When a measure moves, ask why, and decide what you will do differently.
Questions to ask your marketing team or agency
- How many enquiries did we receive this month, and from which sources?
- Which source brought the most customers, not just leads?
- What did each new customer cost us to acquire?
- What will we change next month based on this?
If your current reporting cannot answer these, a measurement and reporting review can help set it up. For teams who want to build reporting skills, see marketing analytics training.