How to tell whether your marketing is actually working

Busy is not the same as working

The most common way a business loses money on marketing isn’t fraud or incompetence. It’s activity everyone can see and nobody has measured. Posts going out, ads running, a site being updated, and no one able to say what any of it produced.

You don’t need to be good at analytics to fix this. You need three numbers and the discipline to write them down every week.

The three numbers

• Enquiries. How many people got in touch this week, by any channel.
• Source. Where each one came from, roughly: search, social, ads, referral, walk-in.
• Outcome. How many became paying customers, and what they were worth.

A spreadsheet is enough. The value isn’t in fancy tracking. It’s in having a record you can look back over, because a trend only shows up once you’ve a few months of it.

Match the measure to the timescale

Different activities pay back at different speeds. Judging them all monthly will lead you to stop the ones that were working.

Paid advertising should show something within two weeks. Changes that make a website convert better show within a month. SEO and content take three to six months before the trend means anything. Brand work is slower still and may never be cleanly traceable.

Decide the review period before you start, and stick to it. Stopping an SEO retainer at month two because it has produced nothing isn’t a decision. It’s a misunderstanding of what you bought.

Watch the trend, not the week

Weekly numbers bounce around for reasons that have nothing to do with your marketing. A holiday. Two weeks of rain. A competitor’s promotion. The end of the month.

Compare a rolling three months against the three before it. That smooths out the noise and still catches a real decline early enough to act on.

Knowing when to stop something

Stop when a customer costs more to win than they’re worth, and it has had a fair run at its own timescale. That’s the whole rule.

Not reasons to stop: you’re bored of it, a competitor is doing something else, or one month was poor. A reason to look harder: the numbers have been flat for two review periods and nobody can explain why.

A monthly review you can copy

Fill this in on the first working day of each month. It takes ten minutes once the habit is set.

Keep every month on the same sheet. After three months the trend is visible; after a year you will know which channels earn their money far better than any dashboard could tell you.

A one-page monthly review

Once a month, write down: enquiries this month against last, where they came from, what we changed, what it seems to have done, and what we’ll change next. Half a page, fifteen minutes.

Businesses that do this regularly make visibly better decisions than businesses with far cleverer analytics and no habit of looking at them. If your agency’s report doesn’t let you fill that page in, ask them for one that does.

Ours is built to answer exactly those questions, which is the point of reporting you can actually read.

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Questions people ask