Most marketing reports are unreadable in a specific way: they are full of numbers and none of them answer the question. Reach was 40,000. Engagement was up 12 per cent. Followers grew by 340. Whether your marketing is working is not addressed anywhere in the document, and the reader is left to infer it from the general upward direction of the arrows.
You can answer the question with three numbers. None of them are difficult and none require a new tool. What they require is the discipline to count enquiries properly, which is the part almost everyone skips.
Number one: enquiries
How many people asked to buy something this month. Not visitors, not leads in a vague sense, not people who liked a post. People who made contact with an intention: a form, a call, a WhatsApp, a walk-in, a reply to a quote.
This sounds trivially easy and it is where most businesses fail, because enquiries arrive through five channels and nobody writes them in one place. The phone gets answered and forgotten. WhatsApp lives on one person phone. The form emails somebody who files it. By month end there is no total, so the number does not exist, so nothing downstream of it can be calculated.
Number two: cost per enquiry
Everything you spent on marketing, divided by the number of enquiries. All of it: the agency fee, the ad spend, the tools, the photographer. One number on the top, one on the bottom.
It is blunt and that is its value. It cuts through every argument about whether a channel is doing well, and it is the only figure that makes different kinds of spending comparable. An illustrative example: R20,000 spent, 40 enquiries, R500 an enquiry. If your average sale is R1,500 and you close a third of enquiries, each enquiry is worth R500 to you, and you are exactly at break-even. That is a decision you can act on. Reach of 40,000 is not.
| What you compare | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| This month against last quarter | Whether it is improving, once you have enough months to see past the noise |
| One channel against another | Where the next rand should go |
| Cost per enquiry against value per enquiry | Whether to spend more, spend less, or fix the sales process instead |
Number three: the share that becomes customers
Of the people who enquired, how many bought. This is the number that tells you whether a marketing problem is actually a marketing problem.
If enquiries are up and sales are flat, more marketing will not help you. Either the enquiries are the wrong people, which is a targeting and messaging problem, or they are the right people and something after the enquiry is losing them, which is a sales problem and no amount of advertising fixes it. Businesses spend a lot of money on the first explanation when the second one is true, because the first is somebody else job.
If enquiries are rising and sales are not, the problem has moved downstream and more marketing will make it worse, not better.
What to stop reading
Not because these are meaningless, but because they cannot answer the question and they crowd out the ones that can.
- Reach and impressions. How many people could have seen it. Useful for diagnosing a drop, useless as a headline.
- Engagement rate. Tells you a post was interesting. Interesting and profitable are different things and often unrelated.
- Follower count. A number that mostly goes up regardless of what you do, which is exactly why it appears on so many reports.
- Website sessions on their own. Traffic without enquiries is a cost, not a result.
A quick test for any report: is there a number in it that would change a decision? If every figure could go up or down and you would do exactly the same thing next month, you are being sent a status update rather than a measurement.
How often to look
Monthly for the count, quarterly for the judgement. A single month in a small business is mostly noise: one large order, one public holiday, one week of load shedding, and the line moves for reasons that have nothing to do with the marketing. Three months is the shortest period over which most channels produce a signal you can trust, and search and content are slower than that again.
The practical consequence is that you should resist changing course on one bad month, and resist celebrating one good one. The businesses that get the most out of marketing are usually the ones that left something running long enough to find out whether it worked.
The point
You do not need a dashboard. You need a list of enquiries with dates and sources, a total of what you spent, and an honest count of what closed. Kept for a quarter, that will tell you more about whether your marketing is working than any report you have been sent, and it will make the next conversation with whoever runs it a considerably shorter one.
Sources and method
- Framework is standard direct-response measurement practice rather than proprietary. No client figures are used; the worked example is illustrative and labelled as such.
Written by Assay House, a South African brand strategy and creative agency. Published 28 August 2026.
