Many marketing reports run to a dozen pages of charts, and after reading them it’s still unclear whether marketing pays off. Not because the data is bad. Because the report answers the delivery team’s questions rather than leadership’s: what does a customer cost us, and is it worth putting in more money.
Five numbers
- Spend. How much we spent in the period, broken down by channel. Including tools and contractors, not just the ad budget.
- Leads. How many inquiries came in that meet the lead definition agreed with sales. Without that definition, marketing counts every form and sales counts none.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Marketing spend divided by the number of new customers in the period. For example: $20,000 spent in a quarter and four new customers is a CAC of $5,000.
- Funnel conversion. What percentage of leads turn into a call, calls into a proposal and proposals into a customer. It shows where most opportunities are lost.
- Revenue or pipeline value from marketing. How much revenue the acquired contacts brought in, and with a long sales cycle, the value of open proposals.
Metrics such as CTR, cost per click or follower count are still needed, but by the team running the campaigns. In a report for leadership, a one-sentence summary of them is enough if it explains a change in the five main numbers.
The same sheet every week
The most important quality of a good report is repetition. The same columns, the same definitions, every week. A single week says little, but twelve weeks in a row show a trend, and a trend is what decisions are based on.
| Week | Spend | Leads | Cost per lead | Calls | Proposals | Customers | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | what changed | ||||||
| 2 |
CAC and revenue are worth calculating monthly or quarterly, because in B2B sales the weekly figures swing too much.
How to know what brought in a customer
In B2B the buying journey is long and rarely starts with a single click. So it’s worth establishing a customer’s source in three ways at once:
- UTM parameters on every link from campaigns, newsletters and profiles, as with the link in your Google Business Profile.
- A “source” field in the CRM, filled in for every new contact.
- A question in the form: “How did you hear about us?” A simple text field often shows what analytics can’t: referrals, podcasts, conversations at events.
None of these methods is perfect. Together they give a good enough picture to move budget around.
Rhythm: a week to observe, a month to decide
Every week, a short review: did something break, are the numbers moving the right way. Once a month, decisions: which channels get more budget, which get less, what we test next. Changing strategy every week because of one weaker week is the fastest way to learn nothing.
The most common mistakes
- Changing definitions along the way. If in March a lead is any form and in April only a form with a budget, the chart lies.
- Showing only marketing data. Without sales data you can’t tell whether leads turn into customers.
- A report without conclusions. Every report should end with one sentence: what we propose to change and why.
This is exactly the sheet the clients we run marketing for get every week. Read more on our marketing service.
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