The numbers that tell you a campaign is working

Campaign reports are usually generous. Impressions are up, reach is broader, engagement improved. All of it can be true while the business sees nothing at all.

The problem is not dishonesty, it is that those numbers measure the campaign's activity rather than its result. Three measures are harder to make flattering.

The first is cost per qualified enquiry. Not cost per click, and not cost per lead — cost per enquiry that your sales team agreed was worth a conversation. This requires someone to mark enquiries as qualified or not, which is the part people skip, and it is the part that makes the number mean anything. Once you have it, channel decisions stop being arguments.

The second is the share of enquiries that convert, split by channel. Two channels can deliver the same cost per enquiry and be worth completely different amounts, because one sends people ready to buy and the other sends people filling in a form to get a download. You only see this by following the enquiry to its outcome, which means your campaign data and your sales record have to meet somewhere.

The third is the trend in your own branded search volume. If a campaign is working beyond the click, more people are searching for your name than were before. This is slow, noisy and easy to misread month to month, but over two quarters it is the closest thing to a measure of whether anyone remembered you.

There is a reason these three are less popular. They take longer to move, they require cooperation between marketing and sales, and they can all go in the wrong direction while the activity metrics look excellent. That is precisely why they are worth agreeing on before a campaign starts rather than after it.