Marketing reports are often long, colourful and hard to act on: impressions, reach, sessions, engagement, followers, all trending upwards. Few of those numbers tell you whether marketing is making you money. This guide explains the six numbers that do, the ones you can safely skim, why different tools never agree, and the questions to ask whoever sends you the report.
First: agree what counts as a result
Before any number makes sense, you need a shared definition of a conversion: the action that matters to your business. For a service company, that’s usually a qualified enquiry or a booked call. For a shop, it’s a purchase. In Google Analytics 4 these are set up as “key events” (older versions called them conversions).
Be specific. “Form submission” might include spam and job applications. “Qualified enquiry” (a real potential customer, in your market, asking about something you sell) is what you actually want, even if it takes a manual check to count.
The six numbers that matter
1. Conversions: how many results you got
The number of enquiries, bookings or purchases, by channel: paid search, paid social, organic search, email, direct and referral. This is the headline of any report. If it isn’t the first thing you see, ask why.
2. Cost per conversion: what each result cost
Spend divided by conversions, per channel. It’s called cost per lead (CPL) for enquiries, and cost per acquisition (CPA) for sales. Compare it with the maximum you can afford to pay for a result, calculated from your margins and close rate. Our Google Ads budget guide explains how to work it out.
3. Conversion rate: how well visits turn into results
Conversions divided by visits (or clicks, for ads), per channel and per landing page. A falling conversion rate with steady traffic usually points to the website or the offer, not the advertising. A rising one means the site is doing more with the same traffic.
4. Lead quality: how many results became customers
The share of enquiries that turned into paying customers, per channel. This usually lives in your CRM or your sales team’s heads, not in the marketing tools, so it needs to be brought into the report. A channel with cheap leads that never buy is more expensive than it looks.
5. Revenue and return: what the results were worth
- ROAS (return on ad spend) = revenue from ads ÷ ad spend. It’s useful for e-commerce, but it ignores your other costs.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) = total marketing cost (ad spend, fees and tools) ÷ new customers.
- Payback: how long a new customer takes to generate enough gross profit to cover what it cost to acquire them.
For service businesses with long sales cycles, the value of open opportunities (the pipeline) may be more useful month to month than closed revenue.
6. Headroom: how much more is available
For paid search, this is search impression share: the percentage of eligible searches where your ad appeared. In particular, look at the share lost because of budget. If a campaign is profitable and loses a lot of impressions to budget, spending more is likely to bring more results. For organic search, the equivalent is the trend in impressions and clicks in Search Console.
Numbers you can skim
These aren’t useless, but on their own they don’t show business results:
| Metric | Why it’s not enough on its own |
|---|---|
| Impressions and reach | Being seen isn’t the same as being chosen |
| Followers and likes | They rarely correlate with enquiries |
| Sessions and page views | Traffic that doesn’t convert costs money without earning it |
| Click-through rate | Useful for improving ads, but a high CTR on the wrong audience is still waste |
| Email open rates | Inflated by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which loads emails automatically |
| Average position / rankings | Rankings for terms nobody searches, or that don’t convert, don’t matter |
A good report uses these to explain changes in the six key numbers. For example: “conversions fell because impression share dropped after a competitor raised bids”. It doesn’t use them as results.
Why the numbers never agree
Google Ads, Meta, Google Analytics and your CRM will almost always report different numbers for the same period. This is normal. The main reasons:
- Attribution. Each platform gives itself credit. If someone clicks a Meta ad, then later searches and clicks a Google ad before buying, both platforms may count that sale.
- Attribution windows. Platforms count conversions that happen days or weeks after a click, or after merely seeing an ad, each using different time windows.
- Consent and privacy. Visitors who decline cookies are partly invisible, and platforms fill some of the gap with modelled estimates. See our Consent Mode v2 guide.
- Timing. Ad platforms usually record a conversion on the date of the click, analytics on the date of the conversion.
The practical answer: choose one source of truth for results, usually your CRM or your actual sales, and use the platforms’ numbers to compare campaigns within each platform, not to add up the totals.
What a good monthly report looks like
- A one-paragraph summary in plain language: what happened, and whether it’s good or bad against the target.
- The six numbers, compared with last month, the same month last year where relevant, and the target.
- What was done this month, and why.
- What didn’t work, and what changes as a result.
- The plan for next month, with any decisions needed from you.
Questions to ask about any marketing report
- How is a conversion defined here, and does it include spam or duplicates?
- What did each result cost, compared with what we can afford?
- How many of these leads became customers?
- Which numbers come from the ad platforms, and which from our own records?
- What would happen if we spent 20% more, or 20% less?
- What’s the one thing you’d change next month, and why?
If a report can’t answer these, it’s describing activity, not results.