What to measure in your first ninety days of marketing

Impressions and follower counts are easy to produce and easy to report, which is precisely why they dominate marketing updates. They tell you that something happened. They do not tell you whether it was worth paying for.

The first thirty days: establish a baseline

You cannot improve what you have never measured. Before optimising anything, get tracking in place and leave it alone long enough to produce an honest picture. That means analytics installed correctly, conversion events defined, and every channel tagged so you can tell paid traffic from organic.

• Sessions by source, so you know where people actually come from
• Enquiries or purchases, counted the same way every time
• Cost per enquiry on any paid channel
• The pages people land on and the pages they leave from

Days thirty to sixty: find the leak

With a baseline, the interesting question becomes where people fall out. A channel that sends plenty of traffic but almost no enquiries is not a traffic problem — it is a mismatch between what the ad promised and what the page delivers. Conversion rate by landing page is usually the number that exposes it.

What is working, what is not working, where are we getting results, what is our return on investment, and what should we do next?

Days sixty to ninety: judge the spend

By now there is enough data to compare channels honestly. The metric that matters is cost per acquired customer against what that customer is worth — not clicks, not reach, not engagement rate. A channel with poor engagement and cheap customers beats a channel with beautiful engagement and none.

What to leave out of the report

If a number would not change a decision, it does not belong in the report. Most dashboards are cluttered with metrics nobody acts on, which makes the two or three that matter harder to see. Report fewer things, and report them against the goals agreed at the start.