Big companies do not measure marketing because they have analysts. They measure it because the decisions are expensive and nobody wants to defend a guess. Your decisions are expensive too, relative to your budget. Here is the setup I put in place for growing businesses, and it takes an afternoon, not a project.
The five numbers
- Inquiries per month, by source. Forms, calls, messages, walk-ins who mention how they found you. This is the number everything else serves.
- Cost per inquiry, by channel. Total spend on a channel divided by the inquiries it produced. The first time you see this for boosts versus Google Ads versus a mailer, your budget will change.
- Conversion rate from inquiry to customer. If this is low, the problem is not marketing, it is follow-up, pricing or fit. Marketing cannot fix it and more spend makes it worse.
- Average ticket or deal size. Needed to turn cost per inquiry into a yes-or-no on each channel.
- Repeat or referral share. The share of customers who came back or were sent by someone. High numbers mean your cheapest growth is in email and reviews, not ads.
The afternoon setup
- Google Analytics 4 on the website, with the contact form submission and any "call" or "book" button marked as key events. Without this, you cannot see which channels produce inquiries rather than visits.
- UTM tags on every link you control: email, social bios, ads, QR codes, mailers. A link with no tag is a visit with no story.
- One place inquiries land. A simple CRM or even a shared spreadsheet with date, source, status and value. The source field is the whole point.
- Google Business Profile insights checked monthly for calls, direction requests and website clicks, if you are local.
- A "how did you hear about us?" habit at the counter, on the phone and in the form. Low-tech, and it catches everything the pixels miss.
The one-page monthly report
Every month, one page: the five numbers, this month against last month and the same month last year, and three sentences on what changed and what you will do about it. That is the dashboard I built for a Fortune 100 program and the one I build for a two-location business, just with fewer rows. The format matters less than the habit.
What this changes
Once you can see cost per inquiry by channel, marketing stops being a monthly argument and becomes a monthly decision. You put more into what is producing and less into what is not, and you can explain why. That is most of what "data-driven" means in practice.
This setup is part of every digital marketing engagement I run, and it is usually the first week's work. If you would like it done for you, get in touch.