The One Number That Tells You Your Marketing Works
Most companies cannot prove their marketing spend works. Followers, likes and impressions are comfort numbers: they feel good and decide nothing. Here is how to pick the one number closest to money.
A new brand a partner and I recently took on had been passed around agency after agency, each one happy to take the money and hand back work nobody had cared about. Their Google ads were 90% disapproved: they are at 100% approved now. Their Meta account had quietly burned through a pile of cash, including £3,000 on an awareness campaign, the kind that just shows your name to strangers. For a business at their stage, that money should have been chasing sales.
Nothing was broken exactly. It was copy-and-paste: templates, not decisions. And nobody had checked the one thing that matters: was any of it actually working?
Most people cannot prove their marketing works. Here is the fix.
Gartner found that 84% of companies cannot prove their marketing spend works. They spend, they hope, and the number that would tell them the truth is not the one they are watching.
The good news: beating that does not take a dashboard or a data team. It takes one honest number.
Most of what gets tracked feels like progress but proves nothing. Followers. Likes. Impressions. A tidy website score. All can climb while not one of them pays a bill. Call those comfort numbers. They feel good and they decide nothing.
The number that matters is the one closest to money. Pick the single step that, when it moves, means money is coming. That is your money metric.
For most small businesses that is enquiries, bookings, sales, or replies. Watch that one, and let the comfort numbers go.
Your one job this week
Pick your one money metric: the single number closest to a sale for your business. Write down today’s figure and today’s date. Next Monday you will have something almost nobody has: proof of whether the needle actually moved.
The week in brief
- Gartner: 84% of companies cannot prove their marketing works, so budgets get cut on a hunch. One honest number puts you ahead of them.
- Instagram’s new “Your Algorithm” setting lets people pick the topics they see more of. Reach is going to accounts a real person chooses on purpose, not the ones that post most.
- 54% of small businesses now use AI marketing tools, heading past 80% this year. The edge is no longer access. It is taste, and knowing which number you are trying to move.