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If you're spending money on marketing but don't know if it's working, watch this video...
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
You can probably tell me your website sessions, your email open rate and your cost per click without pausing to think. What you might struggle to answer is which of those numbers is actually connected to a sale.
That gap, between the data you can see and the commercial outcome you actually want, is where a lot of marketing decisions go wildly wrong.
Why marketing spend stops making sense
The numbers that appear on dashboards are the ones that update automatically and feel like evidence that something is happening. Sessions. Impressions. Click-through rates. Email opens. Ad spend. Cost per click.
These are easy to find, easy to report, and easy to mistake for proof of progress.
What they do not tell you is whether any of it is moving a potential customer closer to buying.
So you make a change. Results improve. But you're not sure if the improvement came from the change, a seasonal uptick, a referral that happened to land at the right moment, or a campaign from three months ago that finally converted.
So you carry on. The next time results dip, the same question is back on the table.
How to know if your marketing is actually working
I've spent two decades working inside established businesses, and the pattern I see most often is this: they're measuring activity when what they need to measure is movement.
Activity tells you things are happening. Clicks. Sessions. Posts going out. It can feel like progress, and occasionally it is.
Movement tells you something different. It tells you whether a potential customer is getting closer to a decision. Whether someone who didn't know you last month is now actively considering you. Whether the leads coming in are the right kind or just volume that feels encouraging.
When you only track activity, you end up making decisions based on noise. And that's a measurement problem.
Three things worth tracking instead
The first is new qualified contacts. Not total traffic. Not impressions. People who match your profile and have taken a step that means something, registering, enquiring, engaging in a way that indicates genuine interest.
The second is conversion through the whole journey. Not just whether an enquiry arrives, but what happens after it. Does it get followed up promptly? Does that conversation lead to a proposal? Does the proposal close? Each of those is a conversion point. If you only measure the first one, you're crediting it for work that happens further down the line.
The third is which channels are producing customers, not which ones produce the lowest cost per click. Attribution is never perfect. A customer will often touch multiple channels before they buy. The question isn't whether you can prove it mathematically. It's which channels keep appearing when you trace back where your customers actually came from, and which ones generate activity but rarely seem to produce a sale.
These three things will tell you something a standard marketing dashboard almost certainly won't: whether your marketing is moving people towards a decision or simply moving.
If this feels familiar
If your marketing is difficult to explain to yourself or a colleague, if you can't easily say what drove the good months or what suppressed the poorer ones, that's not a sign that something is fundamentally broken.
In my experience, it's usually a straightforward thing to identify once you know where to look. The systems are often there. The issue is that nothing is joined up in a way that shows you the full picture.
A fresh set of eyes on what's actually happening, rather than what the dashboard says is happening, tends to change that quickly.
If that's something worth exploring, the Marketing Diagnostic is a short conversation shaped around your business specifically. No agenda beyond helping you get some clarity. You can find out more here:
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