Report on enquiries, not clicks

Why activity metrics persist

They are easy to move and easy to present. A chart of rising sessions looks like progress regardless of whether anything reached the sales team, and it takes an uncomfortable question to establish otherwise.

The uncomfortable question is simply: how many enquiries did this produce, and what happened to them? Reports that cannot answer it are not measuring the thing the budget was approved for.

Build the join first

Connecting spend to enquiry requires that the enquiry carries where it came from, that the CRM keeps it, and that someone records the outcome. That plumbing is unglamorous and it is the whole job. Attribution models argue about credit; without the join there is nothing to allocate.

It is worth doing before increasing spend, because the alternative is scaling something whose effectiveness is unknown.

What a useful report contains

Enquiries by source, qualified enquiries by source, and cost per qualified enquiry. Then time to first response, because a channel that produces leads nobody calls back is not underperforming, it is being wasted.

Sessions and rankings still belong in the report as diagnostics. They explain movement in the numbers that matter. They are not the numbers that matter.

On published figures

We do not publish performance statistics from client work unless the client has given written permission and the figures come from their own analytics. Any agency quoting an average uplift across accounts is quoting a number you cannot verify and that was not measured in your business.

Ask instead to speak to a client. It is a slower answer and a considerably more useful one.