Measuring Marketing When You Can't Afford an Analyst

'How did you hear about us?' asked consistently at the point of enquiry will teach you more than any analytics setup, because it picks up the channels that don't show up online, like a neighbour's recommendation, the van someone saw, or the card they kept.

The catch is consistency. Asked sometimes, it produces noise. Built into the intake so it's captured every time, it produces a genuine picture within a couple of months.

Impressions, followers and page views are activity. They move without revenue moving, which makes them comforting and useless.

The numbers worth tracking are enquiries, quotes issued, jobs won, and average value. Those four, tracked monthly, tell you whether marketing is working and where it's breaking. A month with plenty of enquiries and few jobs won points to a quoting or pricing problem, and extra marketing spend won't fix it.

Different channels pay back on different clocks. Paid ads can be judged in weeks. Reviews, local search and reputation take months, and judging them on a four-week window will make you cancel the things that compound.

Decide the timeframe before you start, write it down, and don't move it because a slow month made you nervous. Most marketing that gets abandoned was abandoned early rather than proven wrong.