How do you know if your marketing is actually working?

This sounds simple, but it's really important.

Imagine you run a campaign and your website gets 5,000 visits that month.

Great.

Or is it?

If your website normally gets 2,500 visits, that's a pretty significant uplift.

If it normally gets 7,000, we have a rather different story.

A number on its own doesn't tell you very much. You need something to compare it to.

That's why I think regular, ongoing reporting is so important.

If you're keeping an eye on your marketing when you're not running a particular campaign, you build up a picture of what's normal for your business.

Then, when you do something different, you have a benchmark.

You don't need to spend your life looking at dashboards.

But I would have a regular set of numbers that you keep an eye on — weekly, monthly or quarterly depending on the business and how much activity you have.

That might include things like website traffic, enquiries, leads, sales, conversion rates, email performance, social engagement, customer numbers and repeat purchases.

The exact list will be different for every business.

What's important is that you track the same useful measures consistently enough to see how they're changing over time.

You're looking for trends.

Is website traffic gradually increasing? Are more people enquiring? Has your conversion rate changed? Are customers coming back more often? Is one channel starting to generate more business than it used to?

One month's data can be interesting.

A year's worth of consistent data can start telling you a story.

Alongside your regular reporting, you should also look specifically at individual marketing campaigns and activities.

And ideally, decide what success looks like before you launch them.

If the purpose of a campaign is to generate leads, measure leads.

If you're trying to sell a particular product, look at sales of that product.

If you're trying to bring previous customers back, look at customer reactivation or repeat purchases.

It sounds obvious, but it's very easy to run a campaign and then afterwards start looking around for a number that went up.

I'd rather decide upfront:

What are we trying to change, and what would we expect to see if this works?

This is where your regular reporting becomes particularly useful.

If you know what normally happens, you can start looking at what changed when the marketing activity happened.

Did website traffic increase? Did searches for your business increase? Did enquiries go up? Did more people buy? Did existing customers come back? Did a particular product perform better?

And importantly: did those numbers go back down again when the activity stopped?

You're looking for evidence that the marketing has changed something.

It won't always give you a perfect answer — marketing rarely does — but it gives you something much better than "I think that campaign went pretty well."

Website and social data are useful, but they're only part of the picture.

I also want to know what's happening with the customers.

How many customers do you have? How many are new? How many are returning? How often do they buy? What are they buying? How much are they spending? Are some customer groups behaving differently from others?

And how are those numbers changing over time?

This is where I think small businesses can find some really useful information.

You might discover, for example, that a campaign didn't bring in a huge number of new customers — but it encouraged a lot of existing customers to come back.

That's still a result.

Or perhaps one marketing channel generates lots of leads, but another generates fewer leads who are much more likely to become customers.

More isn't always better. Better is sometimes better.

Marketing gives us an enormous number of things we can measure.

That doesn't mean they're all useful.

Followers, impressions, likes, website visits and video views can absolutely tell you something. But whether they matter depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Ten thousand people seeing a post sounds impressive.

But if the objective was to generate enquiries and nobody enquired, I'd want to understand why.

Equally, a piece of marketing might reach a relatively small number of people but generate several very valuable customers.

I'd take that result quite happily.

So rather than asking: "Did the numbers go up?"

I'd ask: "Did the numbers that matter go up?"

This is another thing worth being realistic about.

Customers don't always follow a nice straight line from saw ad → clicked ad → bought product.

Someone might see your social content, hear about you from a friend, visit your website twice, read one of your articles and then Google your business three weeks later.

Which bit of marketing gets the credit?

Probably all of it, to some extent.

Tracking and attribution are useful, and I'd set them up properly wherever we can. But I wouldn't dismiss marketing simply because we can't draw a perfect line between one activity and one sale.

Sometimes we need to look at the wider picture.

That's another reason benchmarks, trends and customer data are so useful.

One of the dangers with having access to so much data is checking it too quickly.

You run something for three days, look at the results, decide it isn't working and change it.

Then change it again.

And eventually you have no idea what actually made a difference.

Some marketing produces results quickly. Other activity takes time.

The important thing is to decide what you're testing, give it a reasonable chance, and collect enough information to make a useful decision.

Then you can ask:

Keep it? Change it? Stop it? Do more of it?

That's when data becomes useful rather than simply interesting.

If you're reading this thinking you need a giant dashboard with 47 different metrics, you really don't.

For a small business, I'd rather have a handful of useful numbers reported consistently than an enormous report nobody looks at.

Start with what you're trying to achieve.

Choose the measures that help you understand whether you're getting there.

Track them regularly.

Then actually look at them.

And don't just report the number — ask what it's telling you.

This is still my favourite part.

Sometimes the most useful thing in your data isn't the thing you originally went looking for.

You might notice that one type of customer comes back much more frequently. One service tends to lead to another. People who join your email list behave differently. Customers from a particular source spend more. One piece of content keeps bringing people to your website months after you published it.

Those little observations can lead to some of your best marketing ideas.

That's why I don't see reporting as something you do at the end to prove whether marketing worked.

It's part of the marketing itself.

Look at what's happening. Ask why. Find the interesting bits. Use what you learn to decide what you do next.

That's where the good stuff is.