How to know if your marketing is actually working

Start with the only number that pays the bills

Forget clicks, impressions and followers for a moment. The number that matters most is enquiries. How many people got in touch this month, by any route: phone, form, email, WhatsApp, a message on your Google profile, someone walking in? That is the figure your marketing exists to move.

The mistake I see over and over is judging marketing by traffic. A campaign sends you a thousand extra visitors and everyone gets excited, but the phone rings no more than it did before. Traffic that does not turn into enquiries is a vanity metric. It looks like progress and changes nothing. If your visitors are climbing but your enquiries are flat, that is worth understanding on its own, and I have written separately about why a website gets visitors but no enquiries.

Count your enquiries every month. Even a note on a whiteboard beats nothing. Once you have three or four months of that written down, you can see whether things are moving, and you have the baseline you will need if they ever stop.

Know where each enquiry came from

Counting enquiries tells you if the total is growing. Knowing where they came from tells you what to spend more on and what to stop. This is the bit almost everyone skips, and it is the bit that saves you money.

The low-tech version costs nothing: when someone gets in touch, ask how they found you. Not everyone answers usefully, and people forget, but do it for a couple of months and a pattern appears. You will often be surprised. The channel you were proud of turns out to bring very little, and the one you ignore keeps sending you your best jobs.

The more reliable version is proper tracking on the website. When someone submits a form or taps your phone number, that action gets recorded and tied back to how they arrived, whether that was a Google advert, an organic search, or a link from your Facebook page. Set up once, it answers the "where did they come from" question for you, month after month, without anyone having to remember to ask. If you run Google Ads without this in place, you are paying for clicks with no idea which ones ever became customers.

Match the money going out to the work coming in

Once you can see enquiries by source, you can do the sum that actually matters: what did each channel cost, and what did it bring back?

Say you spent £400 on Google Ads last month and it produced eight enquiries, of which two became jobs worth £1,500 between them. That is a straightforward win, and worth knowing precisely rather than vaguely. Now say your SEO is costing a similar amount and producing a steady trickle of enquiries that cost you nothing per click and keep coming after the money stops. Different shape, both potentially worth it. You cannot make that judgement on gut feel. You need the figures side by side.

This is really what people are reaching for when they ask about return on ad spend. It is a useful idea, though it is easy to get lost in the arithmetic, which is why I have written a plainer explanation of what counts as a good ROAS. The principle underneath it is simple: money in versus money out, per channel, tracked honestly over a sensible stretch of time rather than a single lucky or unlucky week.

Watch the leak between click and enquiry

Sometimes the marketing is working perfectly well, and it is what happens next that lets you down.

You can be getting plenty of the right people to the website and still lose them, because the page is slow, or vague, or asks them to hunt for a way to get in touch. That gap is usually the cheapest thing to fix, because you have already paid to get the person there. A focused landing page built around a single clear next step will often lift enquiries without you spending another penny on advertising.

And the leak does not stop when the form is submitted. I have watched businesses generate lovely enquiries and then lose half of them by taking two days to reply. If you are measuring properly, a healthy enquiry count paired with poor sales is a signal in its own right, and it points at your follow-up, not your marketing. It is worth being honest with yourself about how quickly you reply to a new enquiry, because no amount of clever advertising survives a slow response.

Give it long enough to mean something

Marketing does not move in straight lines, and a single good or bad month tells you very little. Enquiries dip in August, spike in January, wobble for reasons you will never fully explain. If you judge a channel on three weeks of data, you will talk yourself into stopping something that was working.

Look at trends over three to six months, not fortnights. Ask whether the general direction is up, flat or down, and whether the cost per enquiry is drifting the right way. That patience is the difference between managing your marketing and simply reacting to it.

When enquiries suddenly drop

Patience is easy to recommend until the phone stops ringing. Then the first instinct is to assume the worst and start changing things: pause the ads, rewrite the homepage, ring whoever built the website. I understand the urge, but it is almost always the wrong move, because you end up altering three or four things at once and lose any chance of learning what caused the drop.

A quiet spell is a problem to diagnose, not a fire to put out. Most of the time the cause is something specific and fixable, and often it is not even your fault. Here is the order I work through it in when a client rings to say the enquiries have dried up.

1. Check the drop is real

Our memory of how busy we were is unreliable, and a slow fortnight can feel like a collapse when the numbers say otherwise. Look at the enquiries you have logged over the last few months, not your gut. This is where the counting habit above earns its keep.

Two things catch people out. The first is seasonality. If you fit bathrooms, look after gardens, or sell anything tied to the weather or the school calendar, some months are always quieter, and last year's figures will tell you whether this is normal. The second is the tracking itself. Sometimes the enquiries have not dropped at all, but a change to the website means they are no longer reaching you or no longer being counted.

2. Check whether something broke

More quiet spells than you would think come down to something on the website simply not working. A contact form that silently fails. A phone number mistyped during an update. A thank-you page that no longer loads, so people are not sure their message went through.

Fill in your own contact form, from a phone, as if you were a customer. Ring your own number. It sounds obvious, and that is exactly why almost nobody does it until the work has already dried up. I once spent half an hour with a landscaper who was convinced his marketing had failed, when in fact a plugin update had disconnected his form from his inbox weeks earlier. The enquiries had been arriving and vanishing the whole time.

While you are at it, check that the site loads at all, and loads quickly. An expired certificate, a hosting problem, or a page that has slowed to a crawl will all cost you enquiries without any warning. If you run Google Ads, this matters twice over, because a broken or slow landing page wastes the budget on every click that lands on it.

3. Look at what changed, and when

If the enquiries were fine and then dropped, something changed, and the timing usually points straight at the cause. Did anyone touch the website in the weeks before? Well-meant changes are a frequent culprit, especially when a page that was working gets tidied up and loses the very thing that made it convert.

Did anything change in your advertising? A paused campaign, a new budget, a bidding change, or Google automatically applying one of its own recommendations can all move enquiries within days. If you are not sure what has been happening in the account, the conversions column and your tracking setup are the first things to look at, because a change there can make good performance look like a disaster or hide a real one.

And sometimes nothing on your side changed at all. Google adjusts its search results throughout the year, and a fall in organic rankings can pull your enquiries down with no warning and no obvious reason. If your paid enquiries are steady but your organic ones have dropped, that is a strong hint the cause is a ranking change rather than anything you did.

4. Separate a traffic problem from a conversion problem

Either fewer people are finding you, or the same number are finding you but fewer are getting in touch. Those are two different problems with different fixes. If visitor numbers have held up but enquiries have fallen, the issue is on the page: something about the message, the trust, or the ease of making contact has weakened. If the visitors themselves have dropped, the issue is further upstream, in your SEO, your Google Ads or your Google Business Profile. Your website analytics will usually answer this in a couple of minutes. If you have no analytics at all, that is the first gap to close.

5. Fix the one thing, then wait

Once you have found the likely cause, resist the urge to rebuild everything. Fix the specific problem, whether that is a broken form, a paused campaign or a page that was changed for the worse, and then watch for a week or two before deciding anything drastic. The businesses that panic and tear everything up usually end up worse off, because they throw away the parts that were working alongside the one part that was not. Where a ranking change is behind the drop, remember that SEO takes time to recover, and the fix is rarely instant.

The honest summary

You do not need to become an analyst. You need three habits: count your enquiries, know where they came from, and compare what each channel costs against what it brings back. Do that for a few months and the fog lifts. You stop guessing, you stop paying for things that never earned their keep, you put more behind the ones that do, and when a quiet spell comes you can find the cause instead of panicking.

If you would like a straight look at whether your current marketing is paying off, or a second pair of eyes on why the work has gone quiet, get in touch. We will help you get the right tracking in place and tell you honestly what is working, what is not, and what we would change, whether that is your website, your SEO or your ads.