Advertising Report for Owners: Five Numbers Instead of Clicks

A standard agency report runs to eleven pages of impressions, clicks and click-through rates, and answers none of the questions an owner actually has. Five numbers on a single page do the job.

Which five numbers belong on one page?

• Spend. What left your account this week, across all channels together.
• Enquiries. How many real approaches arrived — calls, forms, messages — not clicks.
• Cost per enquiry. Spend divided by enquiries. The number that tells you whether advertising is working.
• Customers. How many of those enquiries became paying customers.
• Cost per customer. Spend divided by customers, held against what a customer is worth to you.

Everything else is working detail for whoever manages the campaigns. An owner needs these five, week by week, so the trend is visible rather than a single snapshot.

How do you tell bad advertising from bad follow-up?

By where the chain breaks, and the five numbers show it directly.

If enquiries are expensive — few arrive for the money spent — the problem is upstream: the audience, the message or the landing page. That is an advertising problem.

If enquiries are cheap and plentiful but few become customers, advertising is doing its job and the loss is happening after the enquiry arrives: response time, quality of conversation, quoting, follow-up. Changing the campaigns will not fix it.

This one distinction settles most arguments between owners and agencies, and it takes two numbers rather than a meeting.

When should you switch a campaign off?

When cost per customer exceeds what a customer is worth, and has done for long enough that it is not noise. For most small businesses that means three to four weeks of data, not three days.

Two traps here. Switching off too early, before there is enough data to judge — common and expensive. And leaving a campaign running because it produces cheap enquiries that never become customers — equally common, and worse, because it looks like success on the dashboard.

Set the threshold before launch: the maximum you will pay for a customer. Then the decision is arithmetic rather than argument.

What stops you counting honestly?

• Calls that go uncounted. If the phone is not tracked, the channel that produces your best customers looks like your worst.
• Enquiries arriving through several doors. Form, messenger, email in the footer — if they are not all recorded in one place, the totals mean nothing.
• No source tagging. Without it you cannot tell which channel produced which customer, and you end up cutting the wrong one.
• A long sales cycle. If it takes two months to close, this week's spend and this week's customers are not related. Measure across a period that matches how you actually sell.

Where should you start?

With one number you probably do not have: what a customer is worth to you. Average order value multiplied by how many times a typical customer buys. Everything else in the report is judged against that figure, and without it no amount of advertising data can tell you whether the money is well spent.