More digital marketing guides
If this was useful, here are the other digital marketing guides I have written that go deeper:
- The Marketing Metrics That Matter for a Small Business
- How to Build a Marketing Funnel as a One-Person Business
- A Marketing Strategy for Solopreneurs Who Have No Time
- Marketing Content Services: What You're Paying For (And Why Most Agencies Get It Wrong)
- Email Marketing Is Still the Best Thing You Can Do For Your Business (Here's How to Make It Work)
- How To Build A Personal Brand That Supports Bigger Business Opportunities
- When to Hire a Local Marketing Agency (Instead of Building In-House)
- Looking back to move forward, why rival marketing history matters
- What Works in Digital Marketing Today Beyond Theories
- How to Use Reddit for Lead Generation in (The Step-by-Step Guide Nobody Has Written Yet)
- Famous Brand Failures That Every Business Must Learn From
- From Startup Studio To Global Brand: Building A Scalable Gaming Company
- How to Make Your Brand Memorable in a Noisy World
- 25 Unconventional Lead Generation Ideas Your Competitors Haven't Tried (And Probably Won't)
- Marketing Experts Reveal The Most Effective Website Growth Strategies for
- 10 B2B Lead Generation Tools That Will Fill Your Pipeline in
- Accelerate Your Brand: Strategic Methods for Rapid Follower Growth
- From Spark To Signal: How Strong Content Travels A Modern Marketing Ecosystem
How To Tell If It's Working (And The Vanity Metrics That Lie To You)
Most businesses judge their digital marketing by whatever number is easiest to find. Followers went up. Website traffic went up. Impressions were in the millions. None of that tells you whether the marketing is working, because none of it is connected to money coming in or going out.
Here's the test I'd apply to any metric before it goes on a report: if this number doubled overnight, would anything in the business change? If the answer is no, you're tracking a vanity metric. Followers doubling doesn't pay the wages. Impressions doubling doesn't fill your pipeline. These numbers feel good in a slide deck and mean almost nothing on their own.
The metric that matters is cost per acquisition against customer lifetime value, tracked all the way through to revenue. Not clicks. Not leads. Not even conversions in isolation. You need to know what it costs you to win a customer through each channel, and what that customer is worth to you over time. Everything else is a proxy that might correlate with that number or might not.
Say a business runs Facebook ads that generate hundreds of cheap leads a month. Looks brilliant on a dashboard. But if those leads convert to customers at 1% and the customers who do convert churn after one purchase, the channel is quietly losing money while everyone in the meeting is congratulating themselves on lead volume. Compare that to a smaller, more expensive lead source that converts at 15% and produces customers who stick around for three years. The second one is doing the actual work, even though it looks worse on the cheap metrics.
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To get to that real number you need a few things most businesses skip:
- Tracking that follows a lead from first click through to a closed sale or a repeat purchase, not just to a form fill
- An honest cost figure for each channel that includes ad spend, tool costs, and the time your team spends on it
- A lifetime value figure based on actual customer behaviour, not an optimistic guess pulled from a spreadsheet
- Enough time in the data to see beyond the first sale, especially if your sales cycle is long or your product relies on repeat business
This is harder to set up than watching a follower count climb. It usually means getting your CRM and your analytics talking to each other, and being disciplined about tagging where every lead came from. Most businesses never do this , which is exactly why so many marketing budgets get spent on the channel that looks good rather than the channel that works.
If you take one thing from this: stop reporting on activity and start reporting on outcomes. Activity is what you did. Outcomes are what it got you. Digital marketing that's working shows up in the second column, not the first.
Common questions
What's a reasonable customer acquisition cost?
There's no universal number, it depends entirely on your margins and your customer lifetime value. A useful rule of thumb is that CAC should sit well below a third of lifetime value, ideally lower, so there's room to absorb the cost of retention, support, and the inevitable customers who don't stick around.
How long should I wait before judging whether a campaign is working?
Long enough to see a full sales cycle plus a bit more, and longer still if you want to understand repeat purchase behaviour. Judging a B2B campaign after two weeks when your sales cycle is three months will give you a false read almost every time.
Why do vanity metrics still get reported so much if they're not useful?
Because they're easy to pull, they always look positive, and they don't require the harder work of connecting marketing data to sales data. It's much easier to show a graph going up than to sit down and calculate a true cost per acquisition.
