Analytics and money

A goal is an action you treat as a result: a form submission, a tap on the phone number, opening a messenger. Advertising without goals optimises for clicks; with goals it optimises for requests, and the difference in cost per enquiry can be several-fold. Check goals by hand after every change to the site: one that broke silently looks exactly like advertising that stopped working.

This is an addition to a link's address that tells your analytics where the person came from. Three parts are mandatory: source, traffic type and campaign — in lowercase Latin characters, spelled the same way everywhere. The main mistake is tagging internal links on your own site: it breaks up sessions and wrecks the whole statistics.

Ordinary analytics shows requests; end-to-end analytics shows money, by linking an ad click to a specific deal and its value. Without that link you optimise the number of requests rather than profit, and those often pull in opposite directions. You can start without expensive platforms: tags in links, a form that passes the source, and a spreadsheet.

The most expensive leak happens after the advertising: the request has arrived, the money is spent, and then it gets lost. The benchmark for response speed is 5–15 minutes in working hours; after an hour the person is already talking to a competitor. Not everyone needs a CRM: up to twenty enquiries a month a spreadsheet filled in with discipline is enough.

Calculate on margin, not revenue: subtract cost of delivery from income, then divide by all the channel's costs — budget plus contractor's work plus staff time. A figure above one means the channel earns. The most common mistake is calculating on turnover and forgetting the work: that way almost any channel looks profitable.

A working report fits on one page and answers three questions: what we spent, what we got, what we do next. The figures you need are spend by channel, enquiries, cost per enquiry, clients, revenue and cost per client. Impressions, clicks and average position do not belong in it: they say nothing about results.

A repeat client costs several times less than a new one: the contact exists and so does the trust. Start with three things — build a database with purchase dates, work out the natural interval before a repeat enquiry in your niche, and get in touch a week before it. This works with no ad budget and usually delivers faster than any new acquisition channel.