How to know if your digital marketing is actually working

It has been said that half the money spent on advertising is wasted, and the only problem is knowing which half. In traditional media, that was a fair excuse. In digital marketing, it is not.

With the right tracking in place, you can see where every visitor came from, what they did on your site, and whether they turned into a customer. That makes it possible to cut what is not working and put more budget behind what is.

Setting up tracking properly

Start with the basics:

Google Analytics 4: This should be the foundation. Set it up to track the actions that actually matter to your business. Form submissions, phone calls, purchases, downloads.

UTM parameters: Tag every link in your campaigns so you know exactly which email, ad, or social post brought each visitor to your site. Without this, everything just shows up as generic traffic.

Call tracking: If phone calls matter to your business, use a call tracking tool that attributes calls to specific channels. Otherwise you are missing a chunk of the picture.

CRM connection: Linking your marketing data to your CRM means you can track leads all the way to closed business, not just to the enquiry.

Understanding attribution

When a customer has interacted with you several times before converting, which touchpoint gets the credit?

Last click: The final thing they did before converting gets all the credit. Simple, but it ignores everything that led them there.

First click: The first thing that brought them to you gets the credit. Better for understanding what drives awareness.

Linear: Credit is split evenly across all touchpoints. Fair, but does not reflect that some interactions matter more than others.

Position-based: Roughly 40% to the first touchpoint, 40% to the last, and 20% spread across everything in between. Often the most realistic picture.

The metrics worth tracking

For each channel, keep an eye on:

- Cost per click

- Cost per lead

- Conversion rate

- Cost per customer acquired

- Return on ad spend

And zoom out to:

- Customer lifetime value

- Overall marketing ROI: revenue generated minus marketing spend, divided by marketing spend

Making it useful

Once you have proper data, the work is in acting on it. Put more budget behind the channels and campaigns generating return. Cut or fix the ones that are not. Test things continuously, because small improvements in conversion rate have a big effect on overall ROI.

The businesses that review their marketing data regularly and act on it consistently outperform those that set campaigns running and check back occasionally.