How to measure marketing that grows revenue, not vanity numbers

Marketing reports are often full of numbers that look good and mean little: impressions, followers, likes, open rates. They’re easy to measure, but they don’t pay the bills. Here is a simple way to measure your marketing by what it brings in.

1. Start from the business goal

Write down what you want marketing to produce: enquiries, bookings, online sales or calls. Then list the actions on your website that lead there, such as a contact form, a booking, a phone call or a purchase. Those actions are what you measure first. Everything else is supporting detail.

2. Track those actions properly

Set the important actions up as key events in Google Analytics 4 (what it used to call conversions), and in any ad platform you use. Test each one by doing it yourself: send the form, click the phone number, place a test order, and check that it’s recorded.

3. Tag your links

Analytics can only credit a channel if it knows where a visit came from. Add UTM tags to the links you share in emails, social posts and ads that aren’t tagged automatically:

• utm_source: where the link was shared, such as newsletter or facebook;
• utm_medium: the type of channel, such as email, social or paid-social;
• utm_campaign: the campaign name, such as autumn-offer.

A tagged link looks like this: yourwebsite.com/offer/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=autumn-offer. Agree a naming convention, keep everything lowercase and use it every time, otherwise your reports split one channel into several. Google Ads tags its own links automatically when auto-tagging is switched on.

4. Don’t forget calls and offline sales

Many local customers phone or walk in instead of filling in a form. Ask every new customer how they heard about you, record it in your customer list or CRM, and consider call tracking numbers for your main campaigns.

5. Watch a few numbers per channel

• Email: clicks, enquiries or sales from each campaign, and unsubscribes.
• Social media: link clicks and enquiries from organic posts; cost per lead or sale from ads.
• PPC: cost per conversion, conversion rate and the search terms you’re paying for.
• SEO: clicks from Google Search Console, rankings for the searches that bring customers, and enquiries from organic visits.

6. Compare cost with customer value

The key question for every channel is how much it costs to win a customer, and whether that’s less than the customer is worth to you. A channel that brings fewer leads at a much lower cost may be your best one.

7. Remember that customers use several channels

People often see a social post, search for you a week later, then sign up to your newsletter before they buy. Judging channels only by the last click undervalues the ones that start the journey. GA4 uses a data-driven attribution model by default, which spreads credit across the steps that led to a key event.

8. Keep the report to one page

Each month, answer three questions: what happened, why it happened, and what we’ll do next. If a number doesn’t change a decision, it doesn’t need to be in the report.

If a number doesn’t change what you do next, it’s decoration, not measurement.

Reporting you can act on

Every Weebo campaign comes with clear reporting on traffic, leads and revenue. Talk to us about setting up tracking for your business, or see how we work across email, social media, PPC and SEO.