Strategy2 min read
Five numbers to check in your marketing every month
Five simple numbers that show whether your marketing is working, and how to keep them on one page each month.
In this article
Many owners judge their marketing by feel: a busy week means it works, a quiet one means it does not. That is a poor guide to where the budget should go. Five numbers, checked once a month, tell you far more than likes and views.
1. Cost per lead
Divide what you spent on a channel in a month by the number of enquiries it brought. That is your cost per lead. Count only real enquiries: calls, forms and messages about your service, not likes or follows. Knowing this for each channel lets you compare them fairly, because the busiest platform is not always the cheapest.
2. Enquiry rate
Your enquiry rate, often called the conversion rate, is the share of visitors who get in touch. If a page gets plenty of visits but few enquiries, more traffic will not help. Look at the page itself: an unclear offer, slow loading, a long form or no obvious next step. Fixing the page can cost less than buying more visitors.
3. Cost per customer
Not every enquiry becomes a sale. Divide your marketing spend by the number of new customers it brought and you have the cost of winning one customer. This is the number your bank balance feels. Cheap leads can still mean expensive customers if few of those leads buy, so read both numbers together.
4. Where enquiries come from
Ask everyone who gets in touch how they found you, then check the answers against your analytics and ad accounts. After a few months a pattern appears: which channels bring buyers, which bring people who only ask about price, and which bring almost nothing. Word of mouth and returning customers count too, even if you never pay for them.
5. Customer value over time
Compare what a typical customer brings in over time with what it cost to win them. Someone who buys once is worth one sale; someone who returns every season or recommends you is worth much more. If that value sits well above your cost per customer, you can afford to spend more on growth. If it sits below, more advertising only deepens the loss.
What to do next
Start a one-page report this month. A simple table is enough: a row per month, a column for each number and a short note on what changed, such as a new offer, a price change or a paused campaign. The trend over several months tells you more than any single figure. If you would like a second pair of eyes on your numbers, MB Media House is happy to look at them with you.
