Straight answers
How do I know if my marketing is working?
One test: can you say where your last ten customers came from and what each one cost to acquire? If not, you do not have a measurement problem to solve later — you have the main problem to solve now. Working marketing shows up as booked jobs and revenue attributable to a channel, never as impressions, reach, or likes.
Metrics that mean something
- Booked jobs by source. The only number that pays wages.
- Cost per booked job. Spend divided by jobs won, per channel.
- Lead-to-booking rate. Reveals whether a channel sends bad leads or your follow-up is losing good ones.
- Average job value by source. Some channels bring cheap leads that buy small jobs.
- Revenue against total spend. Fees plus ad budget plus tools, honestly totalled.
Metrics that mostly flatter
Impressions, reach, followers, likes, and website visits. They are not worthless as diagnostics — a campaign with no impressions has a delivery problem — but none of them tell you whether the business made money, and a report built mainly from them is usually hiding that it did not.
How to start measuring this week
- Ask every caller how they found youCrude, but it takes ten seconds and beats guessing. Write it down somewhere consistent.
- Get every lead into one placeYou cannot attribute what is scattered across four inboxes. This is what a CRM is genuinely for.
- Record outcomes, not just arrivalsEvery lead ends as booked, lost, or not-yet. Without the outcome, lead counts tell you nothing.
- Review monthly, decide quarterlyLocal numbers are noisy week to week. Look monthly, but do not kill a channel on a fortnight of data.
A fair warning about agency reporting: if your monthly report leads with impressions and engagement, ask for cost per booked job instead. If nobody can produce it, that is the answer to your question.
Related reading
CRM Implementation
Where attribution becomes possible.
What is a good cost per lead?
Setting the benchmark.
Find out what your market is actually worth.
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Book a Free Strategy CallOr reach Kai directly: (272) 394-5885 · kai@sallesmedia.com