Reach, impressions, likes, clicks. None of them pay wages. If your ads report is full of numbers like these and light on anything about enquiries or sales, you do not actually know if your money is working.
Vanity metrics vs money metrics
Vanity metrics feel good and mean very little on their own. A post reaching ten thousand people is meaningless if none of them ever call. The metrics that matter are the ones tied to money: enquiries, bookings, and where possible, actual sales. Everything else is context, not the scoreboard.
What a lead should actually cost you
Every business has a number above which an enquiry costs more than it is worth, based on what that enquiry is typically worth once it becomes a customer. Very few owners have actually worked out what that number is for their business. Without it, you cannot tell if your ads are cheap or expensive. You are just looking at a total spend figure and guessing.
The tracking you need before you spend a dollar
Before any ad spend, you need a way to see where an enquiry actually came from. That does not have to be complicated. It can be as simple as a dedicated phone number, a tracked form, or even just asking new customers how they found you and recording the answer properly. Without that, ad reporting and reality quietly drift apart, and you end up making decisions on incomplete information.
Reading a report without the jargon
Ignore the platform’s own headline numbers for a moment and ask three plain questions instead. How many actual enquiries did this produce. What did each one roughly cost. Did any of them turn into paying customers. If an agency’s reporting cannot answer those three in plain language, the report is decoration, not information.
When to turn ads off
Sometimes the right answer is to stop. If a campaign has run long enough to judge fairly and the cost per enquiry is clearly too high, turning it off is not failure, it is the correct call. Money not spent on an underperforming campaign is money available for the channel that is actually working, whether that is a different ad approach or the SEO foundations that keep working long after you stop paying for clicks.
None of this matters if the leads that do arrive then sit unanswered. If that sounds familiar, it is worth reading where small businesses actually lose leads alongside this one. You can see our approach to digital marketing more broadly as well.