At least every quarter, the marketing reports pop up in your inbox and they’re getting longer. More graphs. More acronyms. More metrics that require a decoder to understand.
Meanwhile, you’re trying to run a business and simply want to know if your marketing is working and you’ve got a healthy pipeline of leads to support the sales team, not decipher what “CPM” means or why “engagement rate” matters.
Marketing metrics have a habit of getting overcomplicated and it’s often because the results aren’t there. Complexity becomes camouflage.
There are however three key numbers that tell you everything you need to know about whether your marketing is building your business or just keeping people busy.
The Challenge With Modern Marketing Reporting
Marketing has become obsessed with measurement. Every click, scroll, and hover gets tracked and every platform seems to generate a different report. Your browser can soon fill up with dashboards showing thousands of data points.
Yet somehow, you still can’t answer the fundamental question: “Is this actually working?”
The issue isn’t that marketing can’t be measured. It’s that most measurements don’t connect to what you care about; growth, profit, and keeping the lights on.
You don’t need to understand the technical details of how tracking works. You need to understand the commercial reality: are we spending money wisely, and is it bringing customers through the door?
Metric One: What Does a New Customer Cost?
This is the foundation of everything. Before you worry about engagement rates or follower counts, you should know one simple thing: how much money do you spend to get one new customer?
But Why?:
Whether you’re advertising online, in print, at trade shows, or through carrier pigeon, you’re investing resources to acquire customers. If you don’t know what each customer costs, you’re flying blind.
How to find it:
To get an approximate guide, add up everything you spend on marketing in a month – advertising, content creation, photography, design, the lot. Then count how many new customers came through the door that month. Divide the first number by the second.
That’s your customer acquisition number. It’s not perfect (some customers take longer to convert), but it gives you a baseline truth.
What to do with it:
Track this number monthly. If it’s climbing, something’s broken as your marketing is getting less efficient. If it’s dropping, something’s working, this is time to double down on whatever changed.
Most importantly, this number needs to make commercial sense. If you spend £500 to acquire a customer who spends £200 with you, you’ve got a problem that no amount of “brand awareness” talk will fix.
Metric Two: Is Your Message Connecting?
This metric measures the gap between visibility and action. Lots of businesses get seen. Their ads run, their website gets traffic, they’re showing up, yet nobody’s raising their hand to enquire.
Why does this matter?:
If people see your marketing but don’t respond, the problem is usually your message. You’re either talking to the wrong audience or saying the wrong thing to the right audience.
How to find it:
Look at the number of people who see your marketing (website visitors, ad impressions, people at your exhibition stand) compared to the number who take action (fill in a form, call you, request a quote).
You don’t need fancy formulas here. If 1,000 people visit your website and 2 enquire, you’re converting 0.2%. If 100 people see your ad and 5 click through to learn more, that’s 5%.
Now what do I do with it?:
If this number is low (and it almost always is at first), the issue is usually clarity. People don’t understand what you do, why it matters to them, or what they should do next.
This is where that customer acquisition number from Metric One connects.
If acquiring customers is expensive, poor message-market fit is usually the culprit. You’re paying for attention but failing to convert it into interest.
The fix isn’t more budget. It’s clearer messaging that speaks to your customer problems in the language they use.
Metric Three: Are You Building a Business or Just Staying Busy?
This is the commercial health check. You can acquire customers efficiently and convert well, but if those customers aren’t worth more than they cost to acquire, you’re just busy and you’re not building a sustainable business.
Why this matters:
A customer who spends £1,000 with you once is worth £1,000. A customer who spends £1,000 and comes back three more times is worth £4,000. Big difference.
How to find it:
Work out what an average customer is worth to your business over their entire relationship with you, not just the first purchase. Then compare that to what it costs to acquire them.
A healthy business sees customers worth at least three times what they cost to acquire. If a customer costs you £500 to win but spends £1,500 with you over time, you’re in good shape.
If those numbers are close to each other (£500 to acquire, £600 lifetime value), you’re getting into deep water, as you’re making a tiny margin while working hard to replace customers who don’t stick around.
What to do:
If this ratio is wrong, you’ve got two levers to pull:
- Reduce how much it costs to acquire customers (improve your marketing efficiency)
- Increase how much customers spend with you (better retention, repeat business, higher-value services)
Most businesses focus only on acquisition. The smart ones realise that keeping customers coming back is often easier and cheaper than constantly finding new ones.
The Three-Question Marketing Meeting Test
Here’s a practical tool you can use in every marketing discussion, whether it’s with your team, an agency, or a freelancer.
When someone presents you with a metric or a campaign result, ask these three questions:
Question 1: Does this number represent a person or just activity?
Impressions, reach, and engagement are activity. Enquiries, quotes sent, and customers won are people. Focus on people.
Question 2: Can we pay our staff with this metric?
“Brand awareness” doesn’t pay salaries. Revenue does. If a metric doesn’t connect to revenue eventually, it’s not worth obsessing over.
Question 3: If this number doubled tomorrow, would the business grow?
If your “likes” doubled but your enquiries stayed flat, nothing meaningful changed. If your enquiries doubled, your business has a real problem to solve (a good problem, but still a problem).
These questions cut through complexity fast. They force the conversation back to what matters commercially, not what sounds impressive in a presentation.
Why Simple Metrics Win
The businesses that grow consistently aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated analytics, but the ones who understand their fundamental data and make decisions based on what drives the business forward.
Your marketing teams should absolutely be looking at the wider details around these three key metrics, but you simply need to know whether your marketing investment is working and where to focus your energy when it isn’t.
- What does a customer cost?
- Is our message working?
- Are we building something sustainable?
When your next marketing report arrives, skip to these three numbers. If they’re healthy and improving, keep going. If they’re not, you know exactly where to dig deeper. No decoder required.
Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective. If you’re looking for more straightforward approaches to growing your business, explore our other marketing insights or get in touch to discuss how we can help clarify what’s working (and what’s not) in your marketing efforts.
