More marketing data is available than ever before. But business owners still want the same thing they always have: to know if it’s working.
It’s the age-old question. There’s just more data standing between the question and the answer. So we asked our team, in their own area of expertise: what would you look at, or show a business owner, to know if marketing is working?
Lead Volume, MQLs, and SQLs
Paul Frodge, President & CEO
Leads are the number business owners tend to celebrate or panic over, and it makes sense. Years of data support a rough formula for approximating revenue from lead count. But leads can change year over year for reasons that have nothing to do with marketing: seasonality, lead-to-close ratios, a newer sales team, competition. Looking at Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) matters just as much. If leads are coming in unqualified, the raw number can point in a positive or negative direction that isn’t real.
If you have only five minutes to understand whether a company’s marketing is healthy, focus on the whole funnel: leads through closed business, revenue, and margin. Leads on their own only tell part of the story. What matters is how many of those leads actually turn into closed deals, what those deals are worth, and what’s left after the cost of winning them. A business can generate plenty of leads and still be unhealthy if the close rate is weak or the margins on those deals are thin.
Looking at the funnel this way, from lead to close to margin, is what shows whether spend is working and where it should go next. If the funnel is strong from lead to close, the budget conversation is about scaling what’s working. If it’s breaking down somewhere in the middle, that’s where the real problem is, and it’s rarely solved by generating more leads at the top.
Impressions get skipped in that conversation, but they matter for brand building over time. A business with strong brand recognition gets cheaper leads for years, because people trust the name before they ever fill out a form.
“Leads are a number business owners celebrate or panic over. I’d look at MQLs and SQLs instead, and the whole funnel through revenue.”
Website Traffic Quality and Server Error Logs
Allie Schroeder, Marketing & Account Director, and Ryan Braughler, Full-Stack Web Developer
One number clients tend to judge success on that rarely tells the whole story is website traffic. A seasonal business seeing a dip month over month isn’t necessarily a marketing problem. It might be the same pattern that shows up every year. A spike or drop is worth digging into, but it’s often a one-time event, like bot traffic or a press mention, rather than a sign the strategy needs to change. Paid and organic traffic need to be looked at separately too, since a shift in ad spend can move the overall number on its own.
What traffic alone tells you is reach. Whether it’s quality traffic is a different question. High traffic volume paired with low conversions or low time on site usually means the wrong audience is showing up.
A page can look complete with good information, an easy way to reach out or get a quote, and plenty of visitors. But if people leave right after they arrive, or don’t stick around long enough to read what’s there, that signals the page needs a redesign. A high bounce rate points to content that isn’t relevant to the visitor or a user experience that’s pushing people away, whether that’s too many pop-ups or a page that’s slow to load. Server error logs matter for the same reason: they can reveal problems with how the website is functioning that don’t show up as an obvious symptom until they’ve already cost you a customer who gave up and left.
Server error logs point to a different kind of problem: something breaking on the back end. A form that fails to submit, a broken checkout step, a page that times out for some visitors but not others — none of that shows up if you’re just looking at whether traffic is coming in. The visitor just gives up and leaves, but nothing about the page tells you why. It’s the error logs that show it first.
“High traffic with low conversions or low tim on site usually means the wrong audience is showing up.”
Creative Goal Performance
Justin Ellison, Creative Director, and Brian Usrey, Graphic Designer
Style is subjective, but whether a design works isn’t. Before judging whether a piece of creative is working, ask what it’s supposed to do. Is it meant to build the brand over time, or is it meant to drive leads right away? Those are two different jobs, and they get measured differently.
To check whether a design is reaching the right audience, it helps to look at it the way someone would see it for the first time: what would they notice first, what would they think it’s saying? Type, imagery, color, and tone all get checked against whether they support that message, and outside feedback catches what’s hard to see once you’re attached to your own idea. Creative should be evaluated against the original goal, even if that means cutting something likable that isn’t helping the work do its job.
“Before reviewing any piece of creative, the first question is the goal it’s meant to serve.”
Lift and Indirect Attribution
Lisa Specht, Media & Public Relations Director
Traditional media — think TV, radio, outdoor — can’t tell you exactly who saw an ad and then bought because of it. There’s no click to follow the way there is with digital. What it does instead is build awareness before someone needs you, and support digital campaigns on a broader scale. To know whether it’s working, look at branded search lift, direct traffic increases, and overall lead volume, not just during the campaign, but in the weeks and months after it runs.
There’s a common misconception that if something can’t be tracked with perfect precision, it isn’t valuable. Digital channels aren’t more valuable than traditional ones; they’re just easier to measure. Search ads capture people who are already looking for a company or product. Traditional media’s job is to make sure a company is recognized and familiar before that need ever comes up. When branded search lifts during or after a campaign, that’s traditional media doing its job, even without a click to prove it.
“Digital channels aren’t more valuable, they’re just easier to measure.”
Paid Search Conversion Metrics
Melissa Morrison, Digital Marketing Manager
Clicks and impressions are easy to point to, but they don’t tell you whether a campaign is working. For lead generation campaigns, the real indicators are form submissions and phone calls. Google can track calls that come through the call button on an ad, including the date, time, length of the call, and which search term triggered it. A tracking number can also be set up to automatically appear on the website when someone arrives through an ad, so a call can be traced back to the campaign that brought them there. For shopping campaigns, it’s simpler: purchases, with the campaign set to prioritize the highest-value sales when there are a lot of products in play.
For branding and awareness campaigns, the goal shifts. Impressions still matter, but so does making sure the right audiences are seeing the ad. Click-through rate by audience tells us which ones are engaging and which ones need to be swapped out. Where the ad is showing up matters too. Not every website or app is a good fit for a given business, so we regularly cut low-quality placements and keep ads limited to ones that make sense. For video campaigns, a completed view is one of the strongest signals, since someone who chooses to watch or engage with a video is far more likely to search for the brand later and consider it when they’re ready to buy.
There’s also a report most business owners never see that tells you a lot about customer behavior: the actual search terms people used before your ad showed up. A business might target “roofers near me,” but the real searches behind those clicks can include “roofers near me hiring” or “roofers near me that sell supplies,” neither of which is someone looking to hire a roofer. Catching those and excluding them keeps the ad budget going toward people who are looking to buy, not job seekers or competitors doing research.
“Clicks and impressions are easy to point to, but they don’t tell you whether a campaign is actually working .”
Organic Conversions and Brand Reputation
Courtney Henderson, Head of SEO & AI Visibility
Keyword rankings and AI mentions are the two things business owners ask about most, and it’s easy to see why. Seeing your name in an AI answer or at the top of a search result feels like proof something’s working. But on its own, that’s a vanity metric. The real question is which search-cited pages are driving leads or revenue, and what the plan is for the ones that should be but aren’t. A good SEO strategy ties to business outcomes. Rankings and AI mentions are a byproduct of getting there, not the goal.
What’s becoming more important as AI changes how people search is brand reputation. Digital PR and review presence now do more for AI visibility than on-site copy edits. SEO used to be mostly about what you published on your own site and profiles. Now AI tools look to a brand’s own site mainly to confirm entity details, not to discover them. Instead, they pull from mentions across the web at scale, news archives, industry forums, review platforms, Reddit, YouTube, and more. AI assistants trust what others say about a brand more than what the brand says about itself, and any SEO strategy that doesn’t account for that is behind.
“Rankings and AI mentions are byproduct of good SEO, not the goal of it.”
Brand Recognition
Taylour Maggart, Art Director
The clearest sign a brand is getting stronger is recognition. If people can recall your brand by its colors, patterns, or tagline without needing to see the actual logo, and it’s coming up in conversation through word of mouth, that’s a real signal something is working. If that recognition turns into a loyal, repeat customer base, that’s another mark in the success column. And if a brand can evolve as the company grows while still staying recognizable, that’s branding done right. It might be harder to put a number on than other parts of marketing, but staying front and center in an audience’s mind is still a measurable kind of winning.
The business results show up even without a single report that says “branding worked.” Brand loyalty is one of them, customers stick with a company because of how it shows up consistently and authentically across every channel and touchpoint. That authenticity builds trust, and trust is what keeps a customer base loyal as a company expands. Referrals are another sign. A brand that’s recognizable and dependable naturally sees more of them, because people are more likely to recommend a name they already trust.
“Staying front and center in your audience’s mind is still a measurable kind of winning.”
Sales Revenue Attribution
Sarah Ganote, HubSpot Specialist & Key Account Manager
Before CRMs, marketing and sales lived on two separate islands. We could tell if marketing was bringing in leads, but once a lead was handed off to sales, whether it turned into a sale was a mystery. Now, CRMs like HubSpot put both marketing and sales on one platform, so a lead can be followed through the entire sales conversation, whether they got a quote, whether the deal closed, and for how much. There will always be things like billboards or radio that have no digital trail to follow, but the ability to follow a lead and know how much revenue it brought in is what’s worth getting excited about.
That tracking opens up something even more useful. When a business has a CRM set up this way, a closed deal can be paired back to the exact ad that started it, so that revenue number can go back to Google with a clear message: send more leads like this one. That’s a metric marketing couldn’t answer before.
“The report I get excited about pairs a closed deal back to the exact ad that started it. That’s a question we never used to be able to answer.”
No single number tells a business owner everything. But knowing which ones to check, and why, is most of the battle. This is how Holland Adhaus measures whether the work is working, department by department. Tell our team what questions you have about your marketing metrics, and we’ll tell you what to look at first.
