Measuring Marketing Performance: What’s Working and What’s Not

Why Measure Marketing Performance?

At its core, marketing is an investment. Whether you’re spending time, money, creative energy, or all three, you’re putting something in — with the expectation of getting something back.

But without measurement, you’re left guessing. You might be spending your budget on channels that don’t convert, writing blog posts that no one reads, or targeting audiences who don’t want what you’re offering. And worse — you won’t know why your most successful campaigns worked, so you can’t repeat them.

Performance measurement allows you to:

• Track progress – Are you moving closer to your strategic goals?
• Prove value – Can you demonstrate how marketing contributes to commercial outcomes?
• Justify spend – Do you have data to support your budget allocation and planning?
• Spot opportunities – Which channels or messages are outperforming expectations?
• Optimise campaigns – Where can you improve conversion rates or reduce waste?

It also builds marketing credibility internally. When stakeholders can see the link between marketing activity and business growth, they’re far more likely to buy in, collaborate, and invest further.

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Setting the Right Objectives

Before you can measure anything, you need to define what success looks like. This is where SMART objectives come in — goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

For example:

• “Generate 250 new leads from social media in Q2”
• “Increase email open rates by 10% over the next three campaigns”
• “Improve conversion rate on the product page from 1.5% to 3% in three months”

These types of goals provide clarity and direction. They also ensure that your team is aligned on what matters most — and can prioritise activity accordingly.

It’s important that marketing objectives support your wider business strategy. If your company goal is to break into a new market, your marketing might focus on awareness and brand introduction. If you’re launching a new product line, your focus may shift to content, education, and short-term conversion.

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Choosing Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Once you’ve set your objectives, you need a way to measure progress — and that’s where KPIs come in.

KPIs are the specific, trackable data points that show whether your marketing is delivering results. The right KPIs help you make better decisions. The wrong ones can send you down the wrong path or encourage vanity metrics that don’t reflect real impact.

Here are some examples, grouped by common marketing goals:

Website Performance

• Traffic sources – Where are your visitors coming from?
• Bounce rate – Are people leaving your site quickly without taking action?
• Session duration and page views – Are users exploring your content?
• Conversion rate – Are visitors doing what you want (e.g. buying, signing up)?

Social Media

• Impressions and reach – How many people are seeing your content?
• Engagement rate – Are people interacting with it meaningfully?
• Clicks to site – Is social content driving real interest?
• Follower growth – Is your audience expanding steadily?

Email Campaigns

• Open rate – Is your subject line encouraging people to read?
• Click-through rate (CTR) – Are people taking the next step?
• Unsubscribes – Are you losing interest or relevance?
• Revenue generated – Are your emails leading to sales or conversions?

Paid Advertising

• Cost-per-click (CPC) – How much does each visitor cost?
• Click-through rate (CTR) – How well is your ad engaging its audience?
• Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) – What’s the cost to generate a sale or lead?
• Return on ad spend (ROAS) – Are you getting a strong return?

Sales and Revenue

• Marketing-attributed revenue – How much of your sales come from marketing activity?
• Average order value (AOV) – Are customers spending more per purchase?
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) – Is it sustainable in relation to customer lifetime value?
• Repeat purchase rate – Are customers coming back?

The key is not to track everything — but to focus on the metrics that reflect the purpose of the campaign and help you take meaningful action.

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Data vs Insight

There’s no shortage of data in modern marketing. The real challenge is turning it into insight.

Data tells you what happened. Insight explains why it happened — and what to do next.

For instance:

• Your ad campaign might generate a high number of clicks but very few sales. Is your landing page underperforming? Is your targeting too broad?
• Your blog may be attracting traffic but not converting into leads. Is your call to action clear? Are readers finding the content helpful or just skimming?

Insight means digging deeper. It’s about cross-referencing sources (like analytics and customer feedback), asking better questions, and avoiding knee-jerk reactions based on surface-level numbers.

And most importantly, it’s about acting on what you learn — tweaking headlines, adjusting targeting, refining offers, or shifting budgets based on what’s working.

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Attribution: Understanding What Drives Results

Customers rarely buy after a single interaction. They might see a social media post, click a Google ad, read a blog, sign up to a newsletter, then finally make a purchase.

Attribution is the process of identifying which touchpoints had the greatest influence on that decision — and assigning value accordingly.

There are several models:

• Last click – Credit goes to the final interaction before conversion (simple but limited).
• First click – Credit goes to the first touchpoint (helpful for brand awareness).
• Linear – Equal credit to all touchpoints in the journey.
• Time decay – Greater credit to the most recent interactions.
• Data-driven – Machine learning assigns value based on behavioural data (available in advanced platforms).

Getting attribution right helps you avoid blind spots. It ensures you’re not undervaluing important but “invisible” activities — like top-of-funnel blog content, or brand engagement on social media — that set up later conversions.

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Tools and Reporting: Making Data Work for You

There’s a vast ecosystem of tools available to track marketing performance, from simple analytics dashboards to complex cross-channel platforms. The right setup depends on your business size, goals, and in-house capability.

Essential tools include:

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – For site performance, traffic behaviour, and conversion tracking
• Google Tag Manager – For tracking specific actions like form submissions or button clicks
• Email platforms (e.g. Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ConvertKit) – For campaign performance and list health
• Ad managers (Meta, Google, LinkedIn) – For ad metrics, split tests, and budget control
• CRM tools (e.g. HubSpot, Zoho, ActiveCampaign) – For tracking leads, deals, and customer journeys
• Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) – For building unified dashboards across platforms

But remember: reporting is only as valuable as the conversations it creates. Set a regular rhythm — weekly, monthly, quarterly — to review results, ask questions, and align activity across your team or departments.

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A Practical Example: A Local Homeware Brand Launch

Let’s say you’re launching a new range of handmade ceramic kitchenware and you’ve planned a three-month campaign to promote it.

Your objectives could be:

• Raise awareness via Instagram and local influencer campaigns
• Drive traffic to your product landing page
• Convert traffic into first-time customers
• Build an email list for future product drops
• Encourage reviews from first buyers

To measure this, you’d track:

• Instagram reach, story views, and link clicks
• Click-through rate from influencer content
• Website time-on-page and add-to-cart behaviour
• Email signups and engagement from new subscribers
• Sales conversion rate
• Review submissions and customer satisfaction scores

After a month, you notice that most conversions are coming from your email list, not paid ads. That insight leads you to focus more on email optimisation and retargeting warm leads — rather than broadening your ad spend. It’s a shift that saves budget and improves performance — and it only happens because you’re measuring carefully and thinking critically.

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In Summary

Marketing measurement isn’t about reporting for reporting’s sake. It’s about clarity, accountability, and growth. When you track the right metrics, in the right way, you don’t just report on the past — you shape the future.

From a single campaign to your entire strategy, measurement helps you do more of what works — and less of what doesn’t. It makes your marketing smarter, your team more confident, and your results more reliable.

Because at the end of the day, great marketing isn’t just creative. It’s calculated. And that’s what makes it powerful.