Start with the business outcome you want, then connect marketing activity to enquiries, suitable opportunities and completed sales where the evidence allows. Keep the definitions consistent and show the period each number covers. A useful report helps you decide what to continue, change or investigate. It does more than show that activity happened.
You do not need to force every channel into one number. You need to understand what the numbers mean and where the evidence stops.
What counts as a useful enquiry?
Agree this before discussing a cost per enquiry. A contact from someone outside your service area is different from a request for work you can deliver. An existing supplier's message is different again.
A simple definition might include the requested service, geographic fit and whether the person has described a genuine requirement. Adapt it to the business rather than borrowing another company's scoring system.
Record why an enquiry is unsuitable. If the same reason keeps appearing, that information can improve the page, targeting or offer. Keep personal details in the appropriate business system, not scattered through presentation slides. If you use Google Analytics, follow its guidance on personally identifiable information: do not send names, email addresses or personal phone numbers in events, page URLs or campaign parameters.
Which stages should the report distinguish?
Use names everyone understands:
| Stage | What it tells you | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| Activity | What was published or run | That a suitable buyer saw it |
| Website visit | Someone reached a page | That they wanted to enquire |
| Enquiry | Contact was made | That the work is a good fit |
| Suitable opportunity | The requirement meets your agreed criteria | That the sale will happen |
| Won work | The business records an agreed sale | That one channel alone caused it |
Some businesses need more stages and some need fewer. The useful part is consistent definitions across reporting periods.
How do you calculate a cost without misleading yourself?
State what is included in the cost and which enquiries are counted. Keep media spend, management fees and project costs visible rather than changing the definition from month to month.
For a purely illustrative example, suppose a test uses £600 of media spend and produces 12 enquiries during the stated period. Media spend per enquiry is £50. If only four meet the agreed qualification criteria, media spend per suitable enquiry is £150. These are invented teaching inputs, not DC Digital or client results.
Neither figure includes other costs. Neither tells you profit. The calculation becomes useful when its limits are as visible as its answer.
What if a buyer encounters several channels?
Record what you can observe and avoid pretending that an incomplete path is complete. A buyer might already know the business, search for it and then use the website form. The last visible visit may not explain the whole decision.
Use customer-reported information as another source, clearly labelled. “They told us a colleague recommended us” is different evidence from a recorded website visit. Both can be useful without being merged into false certainty.
When a figure changes sharply, check the measurement process before assuming the market changed. A form event firing twice or a changed definition can make a report look more dramatic than the business reality.
What should happen in the monthly review?
Bring together the work completed, the outcome evidence and the questions still unanswered. Then write down decisions.
For each important change, record the observation, a possible explanation, what would test it and who owns the next action. Keep an explanation labelled as a hypothesis until you have enough evidence to support it.
DC Digital reports monthly across its marketing services. The purpose is to connect work with the enquiries and commercial decisions that matter to your business. A tidy chart is useful only when someone understands what to do with it.
If you need a clearer way to connect your website, marketing and enquiries, start a project. Tell us what you currently measure and which decisions the report is failing to help you make.