How to Track Them To Actually Tell You If Your Budget Is Working

TL;DR: Most small businesses are tracking the wrong things, or tracking everything and understanding nothing. There are six numbers that, reviewed together every month, will tell you whether your marketing investment is working. This post walks you through what each one is, why it matters, and exactly where to find it, step by step.

You have a Google Analytics account. You get a monthly report from your agency. It has charts. There are colors. Numbers are trending upward. And you still have no idea if your marketing is actually working.

You're not alone in this. Only 21% of marketing leaders say they succeed at measuring their marketing ROI and that's not because the data doesn't exist. It's because most reports are built to look impressive, not to answer the one question you're actually paying to answer: is this money well spent?

The problem isn't a lack of measurement. It's too much of the wrong measurement. Reach, impressions, follower counts, average session duration — these numbers feel like progress. They're not nothing. But they don't pay your staff, and they don't tell you whether the $3,000 you spent on Google Ads last month brought in customers worth more than $3,000.

Only 36% of businesses say they can accurately measure ROI, and 47% struggle to measure it across multiple channels. If nearly half of people whose entire job is marketing can't do this consistently, it's not surprising that small business owners running everything else at the same time are struggling too.

The fix isn't a fancier dashboard. It's fewer, better numbers and knowing exactly where to find them.

Here are the six metrics that matter, and a step-by-step guide to pulling each one.

Metric 1: Total New Leads by Channel

Before anything else, you need to know how many people raised their hand this month, and where they came from.

A lead isn't a website visitor. It's someone who took a specific action showing real interest: submitted a contact form, called your business, requested a quote, booked an appointment. The people who actually did something.

The channel breakdown is non-negotiable. Total lead volume tells you how busy your pipeline looks. Channel-level lead volume tells you which marketing investments are actually producing. Without it, you're flying on instinct.

How to get this number:

If you're using Google Analytics 4, here's the step-by-step to find form submissions and call clicks:

1. Log into Google Analytics and select your property.
2. In the left nav, go to Reports > Engagement > Events.
3. Look for events like generate_lead, form_submit, or contact_us. If you don't see these, your conversion tracking isn't set up yet (keep reading — Metric 5 covers this).
4. Click any event to see the traffic source breakdown. Add the dimension Session source / medium to see which channel drove each lead.

For phone calls, you have two options. The manual version: whoever answers the phone asks where the caller heard about you and logs it. The smarter version: use a call tracking service like CallRail or WhatConverts, which assigns unique phone numbers to each marketing channel and tracks attribution automatically.

Your CRM, if you're using one, should also be logging every inbound inquiry. If you're not using a CRM yet, a simple Google Sheet with columns for date, lead source, and outcome works fine to start.

What you're looking for: A consistent source of leads that's growing month over month. If 80% of your leads are coming from one channel and you're splitting your budget evenly across five, something needs to change.

Metric 2: Cost Per Lead by Channel

Once you know how many leads each channel generated, divide what you spent on that channel by the number of leads it produced. That's your cost per lead.

This is where most agencies don't want you looking too closely. Because when you run the math by channel, the efficiency gaps become obvious. Example: Google Ads at $1,200/month producing 30 leads = $40 per lead. Facebook at $800/month producing 8 leads = $100 per lead. Now you know something. Without this math, you'd keep splitting the budget and wondering why growth is slow.

How to calculate it:

1. Pull your monthly spend per channel from your billing dashboards (Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, your agency invoice).
2. Pull the lead count per channel from GA4 or your CRM (from Metric 1).
3. Divide spend by leads for each channel. That's it. Basic arithmetic that most businesses skip.

Build a simple spreadsheet with three columns: Channel, Monthly Spend, Leads Generated. Add a fourth for Cost Per Lead (= Spend / Leads). Update it every month. After three months, patterns become very clear.

What you're looking for: Which channels are producing leads at a cost that makes business sense given what your average customer is worth. There's no universal "good" cost per lead — a $90 lead is fine for a $2,000 service, and terrible for a $150 transaction.

Metric 3: Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate

Not all leads are worth the same. A Google search lead from someone actively looking for your exact service in your city converts very differently from a Facebook lead generated from a broad interest audience. Cost per lead alone won't show you this gap. Conversion rate does.

Lead-to-customer conversion is the second most important KPI for marketers across businesses of all sizes, according to HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing Report. And yet most businesses track leads in their marketing reports and revenue in their accounting software, with no system connecting the two.

How to track this:

This one requires a feedback loop between whoever handles marketing and whoever handles sales or intake. Here's the simplest version:

1. Every lead that comes in gets logged with its source (this should already be happening from Metric 1).
2. When a lead converts to a paying customer, note that in the same log.
3. At the end of the month, count how many leads came in and how many became customers. Divide customers by leads.

If 40 leads came in and 10 became customers, your conversion rate is 25%.

The more powerful version: track this by channel. If your Google leads convert at 28% and your Facebook leads convert at 5%, that changes the entire cost-per-lead conversation. A $40 Google lead converting at 28% costs you roughly $143 per new customer. A $60 Facebook lead converting at 5% costs you $1,200 per new customer. That's not a small difference.

Most CRM tools (HubSpot, Keap, even a properly formatted spreadsheet) can track this automatically once the habit of logging lead source is in place.

What you're looking for: Consistent conversion rates by channel, and movement over time. If your conversion rate drops significantly while lead volume stays flat, the quality of leads shifted, or something in your intake process changed. Either way, you need to know.

Metric 4: Cost Per Customer Acquired

This is the number that connects your marketing spend directly to your business. Take everything you spent on marketing this month and divide it by the number of new customers you brought in. That's your cost to acquire a customer.

It only becomes meaningful when you compare it to what a customer is worth. If your average customer spends $900 over their first year and your cost to acquire them is $175, you have a healthy program. If your average customer spends $150 and your acquisition cost is $200, you have a math problem.

How to find this:

1. Pull your total marketing spend for the month from all invoices and ad platforms.
2. Pull new customer count from your point-of-sale system, booking platform, or CRM.
3. Divide. Total Spend / New Customers = Cost Per Customer Acquired.

For customer lifetime value, look at your existing customer base. What does the average customer spend on their first transaction? How often do they return over the next 12 months? Multiply average transaction value by average purchase frequency. That's a reasonable CLV estimate.

Once you have both numbers, the question becomes simple: are you spending less to acquire a customer than that customer is worth? If yes, your marketing is working and the question is how to scale it. If no, something in the program needs to change.

This is the calculation that turns marketing from a cost center into a business decision. If you want a faster way to model this out, the Rakos Media ROI Calculator walks through it.

Metric 5: Website Conversion Rate on Key Pages

Every marketing campaign eventually sends people somewhere. Usually your website. If your website isn't converting that traffic into leads or sales, every dollar you spend on ads, SEO, or social is partially wasted before it even starts.

Website conversion rate on your key pages tells you what percentage of visitors to those pages actually do the thing you want them to do. For a healthcare practice, that might be the appointment request page. For a service business, it might be your contact page. For an e-commerce brand, it's your product pages and checkout.

This isn't your overall site average, which is diluted by blog pages, about pages, and every other page that was never designed to convert. Track the specific pages where you're asking visitors to take action.

How to set this up in GA4 (if you haven't already):

If your conversion events aren't set up yet, here's the process:

1. Log into Google Analytics and go to your GA4 property.
2. In the bottom left, click Admin.
3. Under Data display, click Events.
4. If you see events like form_submit or generate_lead already listed, you can mark them as key events by toggling the star icon next to each one.
5. If those events don't exist yet, you'll need to create them. For a contact form submission, you'll create a custom event triggered when someone lands on your thank-you page after submitting. Your developer or agency can do this in Google Tag Manager in under an hour.
6. Once events are marked as key events, go to Reports > Engagement > Conversions to see conversion data.
7. To see conversion rate by landing page, go to Reports > Engagement > Landing page and add the Key events column.

Now you can see exactly which pages are converting traffic and which are losing it.

What you're looking for: A baseline to beat. If 500 people visit your contact page this month and 20 submit the form, you're at 4%. Next month, you try a different headline and it goes to 6%. That's a 50% improvement in leads from the same traffic. No additional ad spend required. If your website isn't converting well and you want a second opinion, our website team looks at this as part of every site review.

Metric 6: Return on Ad Spend for Paid Campaigns

If you're running any paid advertising, return on ad spend (ROAS) is the most direct efficiency metric available at the campaign level. It measures how much revenue is generated for every dollar spent on ads.

A ROAS of 4 means $4 of revenue for every $1 spent. Many marketing experts recommend aiming for at least 5x gross returns on marketing campaigns, though this depends heavily on your overhead and margins.

For e-commerce businesses, platforms like Google Shopping and Meta Ads calculate ROAS automatically when purchase values are tracked properly. For service businesses where sales happen offline, it requires connecting the revenue from closed deals back to the campaigns that generated the leads. More work, but the businesses that do this have a real advantage in how they allocate budget.

How to find this:

For e-commerce:

1. In Google Ads, go to Campaigns and look at the Conv. value / cost column. That's your ROAS.
2. In Meta Ads Manager, look for ROAS (return on ad spend) in your column set. If it's not there, click Customize columns and add it.

For service businesses:

1. At the end of each month, total the revenue from all customers who came in through paid campaigns. (Your lead source tracking from Metric 1 and 3 makes this possible.)
2. Divide that revenue by your total paid ad spend for the month.
3. That's your ROAS.

Even a rough estimate is more useful than no number. If you know you spent $2,500 on Google Ads and acquired four customers who each spent an average of $800, your ROAS is 1.28. That's below break-even for most businesses and a clear signal to investigate before spending more.

Your ROAS target should come from your own margin structure, not an industry benchmark. A business with 70% margins needs different ROAS targets than one operating at 25%. If you're running Google or social ads and don't have ROAS tracking in place, that's the first thing to fix.

How to Use All Six Together

These numbers aren't meant to be reviewed in isolation. The value comes from looking at all six at the same time, every month, and watching how they relate to each other.

Lead volume is up but cost per lead is also up? You're paying more for growth. That might be fine if conversion rate is strong, or it might signal that your targeting is drifting. Lead volume is flat but conversion rate improved? Your leads are getting better quality even if there are fewer of them. Cost per customer acquired is rising while ROAS is falling at the same time? That's an efficiency problem, and the answer is optimizing your campaigns, not spending more.

None of these metrics tells the full story alone. Together, they tell you whether your marketing investment is becoming more or less efficient over time, and whether the customers you're acquiring are actually worth what you're paying to get them.

A simple monthly spreadsheet with all six numbers, updated consistently, will tell you more than most agency dashboards. And if your agency report doesn't include all six of these in a format you can actually read and act on, that's worth bringing up. The business owners who understand these numbers have fundamentally different conversations with their marketing partners, and those conversations produce better results.

If you want help getting this tracking in place, or you want someone to look at your current numbers and tell you honestly what they mean, start here. No pitch. Just an honest look at what the data is telling you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I really need all six metrics, or can I start with fewer?

Start with the ones you can track right now and build toward the rest. Leads by channel and cost per lead are achievable almost immediately. Lead-to-customer conversion rate requires a feedback loop you can build over a few weeks. Website conversion rate requires conversion events set up in GA4, which your developer or agency can usually do in a few hours. Cost per customer acquired and ROAS follow naturally once the others are in place. Don't wait until all six are perfect to start using the ones you have.

My agency sends me a monthly report but I don't see most of these numbers. What should I do?

Ask for them specifically. Request that the report include: new leads by channel, cost per lead by channel, lead-to-customer conversion rate, website conversion rate on key pages, cost per customer acquired, and ROAS for any paid campaigns. If your agency can't or won't provide these numbers, that tells you something important about how they're running your account. At Rakos Media, these are the numbers we start every monthly conversation with.

What is a good cost per lead for my type of business?

There's no universal answer. A good cost per lead is one where, after accounting for your close rate and average customer value, you're acquiring customers profitably. For a healthcare practice, $60 to $100 per lead can be very reasonable. For a service business with a $150 average transaction, that same cost per lead would make the math very difficult. Use the ROI Calculator to model what works for your specific numbers.

How often should I review these metrics?

Review all six monthly. For any active paid campaigns, check cost per lead and ROAS weekly. Paid campaigns can burn through budget quickly when efficiency drops, and monthly check-ins aren't frequent enough to catch problems before they compound. Organic channels move slowly enough that monthly is fine.

What if I don't have GA4 conversion tracking set up yet?

Get it set up before anything else. Without it, you're missing the data behind Metric 1, 3, and 5. A developer can set up basic conversion tracking in GA4 using Google Tag Manager in a few hours. If you're working with an SEO or marketing agency, this should already be in place. If it's not, ask why.

Can I track these metrics even if I'm not running paid ads?

Yes. Leads by channel, cost per lead, lead-to-customer conversion rate, cost per customer acquired, and website conversion rate all apply to organic channels like SEO, email, and referrals. ROAS only applies to paid campaigns, so if you're not running paid ads, you have five metrics to focus on instead of six. Start there.

Sources

• HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing Report via HubSpot Marketing Statistics — Lead-to-customer conversion rate as top KPI, email and blog ROI data
• Firework: 30+ Marketing ROI Statistics 2025 — Only 36% of marketers can accurately measure ROI; 47% struggle across channels
• EasyWebinar: Performance Marketing ROI Guide 2025 — 21% of marketing leaders succeed at measuring ROI
• WickedReports: How to Track Digital Marketing ROI — ROAS targets and calculation methodology for service businesses
• Semrush: How to Set Up GA4 Conversion Tracking — Step-by-step GA4 key event configuration
• InnerSpark Creative: 2025 Small Business Marketing Benchmarks — Cost benchmarks for local and service-based businesses