Money goes out every month to search ads, a social media freelancer, a couple of directories and the occasional print run. Enquiries come in. Nobody can say which of them came from where, so the monthly conversation runs on feelings: the ads “seem” to work, Instagram “feels” quiet, the directory “probably” does nothing. Searching for how to know if marketing is working brings up dashboards and attribution models, when what you want to know is plainer: which channel brought the customers who paid.
The usual conclusions are to buy an analytics tool, ask each platform for its own report, or cut the channel that feels weakest. In our experience the answer is closer than that. There are a handful of reasons nobody can tell, most of them come down to one missing field, and an evening with last month’s invoices and the enquiry inbox shows which reason is yours.
How to know if marketing is working: why the answer goes missing
Every platform grades its own homework. An ad platform counts a conversion whenever a person it showed an ad to later buys, whether or not the ad had anything to do with it, and it does not know what the other platforms showed the same person. Add the platform reports together and you get more sales than you made. The sign: the conversion totals in the ad accounts are higher than the enquiries in your inbox or CRM for the same period.
The source is lost at the doorstep. The website form sends a name and a message but not where the visitor came from, the phone rings without anyone asking, and the CRM has a source field that stays empty or says “website” for everything. The customer knew exactly how they found you; the business never wrote it down. The sign: open a few recent deals and look at the source field.
Revenue lives in one place and enquiries in another. Invoices sit in accounting, enquiries in the CRM or the inbox, spend in each platform, and nobody joins the three. Each report is honest on its own and useless for the question. The sign: nobody in the company can name last month’s revenue by channel without a day of work.
Channels are judged on enquiries, not on paying customers. The channel that brings many cheap enquiries looks like the winner; the channel that brings a few people who actually buy looks expensive and gets cut. This is the same trap as enquiries that never turn into sales: counting the wrong thing makes the wrong channel look good.
Word of mouth and long paths get credited to the last click. A customer hears about you from a friend, sees the van, remembers the name, searches for it and clicks the ad at the top. The ad gets the credit, the friend gets nothing, and the report says search ads are your best channel. The sign: a large share of the ad account’s clicks come from searches for your own company name.
How to tell which one is yours
An evening with the invoices, the inbox and the ad account logins is enough. Go in order; the first check that fails is usually your cause.
- List the customers who paid in the last month or two. Next to each, write where they first came from. If you do not know, ask them; most people remember and are happy to say. Count how many rows you cannot fill: that is the size of the problem.
- Open the source field in the CRM for the same customers. Empty, or the same word for everyone, means the source is lost at the doorstep.
- Send yourself a test enquiry by clicking one of your own ads and filling in the form. Look at what arrives in the inbox or the CRM: if the enquiry does not say it came from that ad, the form is not passing the source along.
- Compare platform conversions with real enquiries for the same weeks. Totals well above the real count mean the platforms are counting each other’s customers.
- Look at the search terms report in the search ads account and note how much of the spend goes on your own company name. That share belongs to whatever made people remember the name, not to the ads.
- Ask whoever answers the phone whether they ask new callers how they heard about you, and where the answer is written. Usually nowhere.
The fix, in order
Cheapest first. The first two steps need no tools and produce a usable answer within a couple of months; everything after that refines it.
- Ask every new customer one question and write the answer down. “How did you hear about us?” goes into the deal at the first conversation, in a field with a fixed list of answers rather than free text. It is imperfect and it is far better than nothing.
- Make the source field fill itself. Tag every link you control, in ads, in social profiles, in email signatures and on print, so that the website knows where the visitor came from; have the form pass that along as a hidden field; have the CRM store it on the contact. In our CRM and analytics projects this is the first thing built, for the same reason that making enquiries arrive on their own is the first fix when a team stops using its CRM: a field that fills itself is trusted, a field that must be typed is not.
- Give the phone a source too. A separate number for the ads, another on the print materials, and the question from step one for everything else. Call tracking services do this automatically; a couple of extra numbers on the phone system do it well enough to start.
- Join spend, enquiries and revenue in one monthly table. One row per channel: what it cost, how many enquiries it brought, how many became customers, how much they paid. This table is the whole of marketing attribution most small businesses need, and it takes an hour a month once the sources are clean.
- Judge channels on revenue, not on enquiries, and move budget by the table rather than by feel. This is the decision that our paid advertising campaigns are managed against, and it is also where a channel that looked expensive per enquiry often turns out to be the one that pays.
- Take your own name off the ads’ scorecard. Searches for your company name are the result of every other channel, including the friend and the van. Count them separately, and look at whether the site already ranks first for its own name, which is a basic part of SEO work, before paying for those clicks.
- Only now consider tools. Analytics dashboards and multi-touch models are useful once the table above has run for a few months and the source field is clean. Bought earlier, they show the same missing data in nicer charts.
What to measure
- Share of paying customers with a known source, monthly; the number to watch until it stops needing to be watched.
- Revenue and spend per channel from the monthly table, looked at over a rolling few months rather than a single month, because customers take time to decide.
- Enquiry-to-customer ratio per channel, monthly, which is what separates a cheap channel from a good one.
- Share of search ad spend on your own company name, monthly, as a check that other channels are not being credited to the ads.
Where we come in
An owner with an evening, last month’s invoices and a fixed list of source answers can get the first honest table in a couple of months. What we bring is the plumbing and the habit: links tagged everywhere, a form and a CRM that carry the source without anyone typing, phone numbers that tell you where the call came from, and a monthly table that the budget conversation is held over. If you would rather have the current setup looked at first, a short brief listing the channels you pay for and where enquiries land today is enough to start.
