Your reach went up. Did your sales?

Every month, somewhere, a business owner opens a marketing report that looks great. Reach is up. Impressions are up. Engagement is up. There’s a nice chart with a line going the right way.

And the phone hasn’t rung any more than it did last month.

That gap, between what the report says and what the bank account says, is the most common problem we see. It isn’t usually anyone being dishonest. It’s that the wrong things are being measured, so the wrong things are being optimised.

Reach is easy to buy

Platforms like Meta are very good at finding cheap attention. Ask for reach and you’ll get reach. Ask for clicks and you’ll get clicks, often from people who were never going to buy. The algorithm does exactly what it’s told, which is the problem when it’s told to chase the wrong number.

If your campaigns are optimised for reach or link clicks, your report will look healthy almost by default. That doesn’t mean the money is working.

The numbers that actually matter

For most businesses we work with, there are only a handful of numbers worth arguing about:

• Enquiries or leads, counted properly, not estimated.
• Cost per enquiry, so you know what each conversation is costing you.
• Bookings or sales that came from those enquiries.
• What happened to the leads after they came in. Were they called back? How fast?

Everything else is supporting detail. Useful for diagnosing a problem, not for deciding whether the marketing is working.

Why most businesses can’t see these numbers

Usually because the tracking was never set up properly. The pixel fires on the wrong page, form submissions aren’t recorded as conversions, or nobody connected the ads to what happens after a lead comes in. So the only numbers available are the ones the platform reports by default, and those are the vanity ones.

Fixing this is unglamorous work. It’s also the first thing we do on every account, before we spend a rand of anyone’s budget.

Ask your agency one question

Next time you get a report, ask: how many enquiries did this bring in, and what did each one cost? If the answer is vague, the report is measuring activity, not results.

You’re not paying for marketing to look busy. You’re paying for it to move something. Make sure that’s what’s being measured.