What to measure: the metrics that track to sales
If your marketing reports are full of impressions, reach and engagement, you already suspect the truth: none of it tells you whether the work is paying. There is a short chain of numbers that does. It runs from enquiry to quote to order, and it fits on one page.
EB You know the meeting. A slide of impressions in the hundreds of thousands. A graph of "engagement" trending pleasingly upwards. A cloud of words — reach, sessions, followers — that sound like progress and commit to nothing. And at the end of it, the question you actually walked in with, still unanswered: are we getting business out of this or not?
You are right to keep asking. Marketing that works leaves a trail through your commercial numbers, and the trail is not complicated. These are the measures we put in front of every owner and managing director we work with — and the ones we quietly take out.
The problem with most reports
Most marketing reporting measures what is easy to count, not what matters. Every advertising platform will tell you, instantly and to several decimal places, how many people saw an ad. None of them can tell you how many of those people became customers. So the industry built its reporting around the first kind of number and learned to talk about the second kind in the abstract.
The result is reporting that exists to justify the activity rather than examine it. If a report can only ever look good, it is not a report — it is a brochure. Impressions cannot go down in a way anyone has to answer for. Enquiries can. That is exactly why enquiries are the better measure.
There is a second, quieter problem. The numbers that do matter live in different places. Enquiries land in an inbox or on a phone line. Quotes sit in a spreadsheet, or in a CRM someone half-maintains. Orders live in the accounts package. Nobody joins them up, so the marketing conversation happens in the platform numbers by default. Joining them up is unglamorous work. It is also the whole game.
The chain that matters
Strip away the jargon and every business that markets itself is running the same chain.
Someone with a need finds you. Some of those people get in touch. Some of those enquiries are worth having. Some of the worthwhile ones get quoted. Some of the quotes become orders. Some of the orders become repeat customers.
That is the whole model. Six links. Every metric worth tracking measures one link in that chain, and everything else is decoration. The chain also tells you where to look when things go wrong. Plenty of enquiries but few worth quoting? A targeting problem, or a message problem. Plenty of quotes but few orders? Probably not marketing at all — look at pricing, follow-up, sales. Measured this way, marketing stops taking the blame, or the credit, for things it does not control.
Measure the chain from enquiry to order, and marketing stops being a matter of opinion. It becomes a line in the management accounts, examined like any other.
The six numbers worth a monthly meeting
Qualified enquiries. Not raw enquiries — qualified ones. A form-fill from a student, a cold pitch from a software vendor and a genuine buyer are three very different events, and a count that lumps them together is worse than no count at all. Agree what a real enquiry looks like — right kind of buyer, right kind of need, plausible budget — and count only those. This one act of discipline transforms every number downstream of it.
Where each enquiry came from. Recorded when the enquiry arrives, for every enquiry, no exceptions. Sometimes the analytics will tell you. Often the honest answer comes from asking "how did you hear about us?" and writing down the reply. Imperfect — but a wall of imperfect answers beats a void.
Enquiry-to-quote and quote-to-order rates. These two conversion rates are where the story lives. They tell you whether marketing is bringing you the right people, and whether the business is converting the chances it is given. Watch them over quarters, not weeks.
Cost per qualified enquiry, by source. The full cost of a channel — fees, media, and an honest allowance for your own time — divided by the qualified enquiries it produced. This is the number that lets you compare a trade show against Google Ads against the referral scheme on level terms, and it is the one that most reliably changes minds about where the budget should go.
Pipeline value added. The value of quotes issued to marketing-sourced enquiries this period. Orders lag — in many businesses by months — so if you only measure closed revenue you will judge every campaign too early. Pipeline bridges the gap, provided the qualification discipline keeps it honest.
Revenue from marketing-sourced customers. The trailing truth. Measured over quarters and years, and including repeat business — because a customer who came in through marketing and reorders for five years changes the arithmetic of what an enquiry was worth.
Six numbers. They fit on one page. If your current reporting does not produce them, that is the first project — before anyone talks about spending more.
To make the page real, give each number an owner: one named person who brings it to the monthly meeting and can explain why it moved. A number nobody owns is a number nobody trusts. And keep the definitions still for at least a year. The urge to refine what counts as "qualified" every quarter is strong, and fatal — change the definition and you lose the trend, and the trend is most of the value. A slightly imperfect measure held steady beats a perfect one that keeps moving.
Attribution, honestly
Attribution — deciding which channel gets credit for a sale — is where measurement tips into fiction. It is genuinely hard, and anyone who claims to have solved it precisely is selling something. Buyers do not travel in straight lines. They hear your name from a colleague, look you up weeks later, read a couple of pages, go quiet, then ring the office from a number no analytics package will ever connect to the visit.
So hold attribution lightly. Use the analytics for what it is good at — patterns and direction. Ask every enquirer how they heard of you, and record it. Accept that the two answers will disagree, and that the truth sits between them. A rough, honest picture consistently maintained will serve you better than a precise-looking one you privately distrust. And be wary of any report in which a channel grades its own homework. The platform's claimed conversions and your order book are rarely the same number, and the order book is the one that pays the wages.
What you can safely ignore
Impressions, reach, follower counts, "engagement rate", video views, newsletter opens as a headline figure, and every ranking report that celebrates position movements for search terms no real buyer is typing. None of these are measures of commerce. At best they are weak leading indicators. At worst they are an anaesthetic — a way for everyone in the room to feel motion without checking direction.
The test for any metric is brutal and simple: if this number doubled, would you expect more orders — and could anyone explain the mechanism? If not, it does not belong in front of the management team. That does not make such numbers useless to a practitioner tuning a campaign. It makes them operational detail, not management information. The engine room and the bridge are different rooms for a reason.
A short diagnostic
Put your current reporting through five questions. Score it honestly.
- Can you say how many qualified enquiries the business received last month, and from which sources?
- Do you know your cost per qualified enquiry for each channel you pay for?
- Could you trace last quarter's five biggest new orders back to how each customer first found you?
- Do your enquiry-to-quote and quote-to-order rates appear anywhere in writing?
- When you last reviewed marketing spend, was the deciding evidence a commercial number — or an activity number?
Five yeses and your measurement is ahead of most businesses several times your size. Two or fewer, and the good news is that fixing it is neither expensive nor slow. It is mostly definitions, discipline and a little plumbing between systems you already own. It is also the first thing we do with any new client, because until the chain is measurable every other marketing conversation is guesswork. And if you are weighing up where marketing money should go next year, this is the groundwork that makes the answer knowable — the arithmetic in planning next year's marketing budget depends on it.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on what you currently measure — and a view on what it would take to see the whole chain — we are happy to talk it through. Thirty minutes, no pitch deck: hello@ninestones.co.uk.