Advertising

Clicks, enquiries and customers: what should your marketing report measure?

A practical measurement plan for Australian business owners: track useful enquiries, qualified leads and customers, then connect those outcomes to your marketing spend.

By Onside Growth

7 October 20265 min read

A report can show more clicks while your diary stays empty. Another can show fewer enquiries while your team wins better jobs. To decide whether marketing is helping, you need to see what happens between the first visit and the final sale.

Start with one question: what useful customer action should this campaign create? For a service business, that might be a genuine quote enquiry. For a booking business, a confirmed appointment. For an online shop, a completed purchase. Build your report around that outcome, then use traffic and clicks to explain how people reached it.

Agree on the meaning of each number

Write a short measurement plan before adding more dashboard charts. Decide what counts, who checks it and where the record lives. These definitions should stay consistent between the owner, the team answering enquiries and the person managing marketing.

Enquiry: a successfully received request for contact, a quote or information. Exclude known spam and test submissions.
Qualified enquiry: a genuine prospect who meets your agreed criteria, such as service area, requested work and suitability.
Customer or won job: the point you choose to recognise a sale, such as an accepted quote or paid purchase. Keep confirmed bookings separate if they can still be cancelled.
Cost per qualified enquiry: the marketing cost being assessed divided by the number of qualified enquiries in the same reporting group.
Cost per customer: that cost divided by customers won from the same group. Allow time for enquiries to become sales.

Track the completed action

For a website form, measure successful submission rather than a click on the send button. A button click can happen before validation succeeds. Similarly, an appointment-page visit is not a confirmed booking. Ask whoever manages your tracking to test the actual journey, including errors and repeat visits.

Google Analytics 4 calls important business events 'key events'. Google Ads uses conversions to measure advertising outcomes and inform bidding. A useful GA4 key event can become a Google Ads conversion when the accounts are linked. Google's own example favours a completed lead form over a page scroll when the goal is lead generation.

Reference: Google Analytics Help — Conversions vs. key events in Google Analytics

Check what the campaign is optimising for

In Google Ads, primary conversion actions can guide bidding when the campaign uses their associated goal. Secondary actions normally support observation through 'All conversions'. There is an exception: a secondary action included in a custom goal can be used for bidding.

Have your campaign manager explain which actions guide each campaign. A report that mixes newsletter sign-ups, contact requests and purchases into one total can hide the result you actually want. Keep useful supporting actions visible, but judge performance against the agreed business outcome.

Reference: Google Ads Help — About primary and secondary conversion actions

Connect enquiries to your business records

Google Ads supports qualified-lead and converted-lead goals using offline outcome data. Those stages need your business to decide whether an enquiry became suitable work or reached the chosen sales milestone. A form submission alone cannot make that decision.

Use a CRM, booking system or well-maintained spreadsheet as your agreed business record. Give each enquiry a reference and update its status. When a person submits a form and later calls, check whether those contacts belong to one opportunity before adding up leads. Keep enquiry, booking and sale totals separate so the same journey does not appear to be three customers.

If outcomes are imported into an advertising platform, ask your tracking provider to explain how identifiers, repeat uploads and duplicate tracking are handled.

Reference: Google Ads Help — About qualified leads and converted leads

Read the numbers together

Illustrative example only: a campaign spends A$1,200 on advertising and produces 30 genuine enquiries. Your team qualifies 12 and wins three customers from that group. The media cost is A$40 per enquiry, A$100 per qualified enquiry and A$400 per customer. These figures are not benchmarks or expected results.

Whether A$400 is acceptable depends on the work's margin, customer value and capacity. Report advertising spend separately from management and software costs, and state which costs each calculation includes.

Use attribution to guide decisions

An attributed conversion assigns credit to recorded marketing activity. It does not, by itself, prove that the customer would never have arrived without that activity. Compare platform reporting with business records, allow for the sales cycle and investigate material differences before changing budgets.

Review which enquiries became customers, which stalled and why. That conversation often makes the next decision clearer than another traffic chart.

Keep measurement proportionate

Collect only the information your measurement plan needs. Google's customer-data policies require disclosure of third-party sharing for advertising measurement and consent where legally required. Sensitive categories have additional restrictions. The OAIC advises organisations using third-party tracking pixels to understand their data flows and applicable privacy obligations. Check what your tools collect and what your privacy notices say before enabling additional sharing.

Onside Growth can help you define useful outcomes and turn them into a clear measurement plan. Start with the result you want, then make sure the report shows whether your business is getting it.

Reference: Google Advertising Policies Help — Customer data policies

Reference: Office of the Australian Information Commissioner — Tracking pixels and privacy obligations