The chain of numbers
- Seen: how often you appear in Google search. Measured in Search Console impressions.
- Visited: how many people click through. Measured in clicks and click-through rate.
- Asked: how many visitors make an enquiry. Measured in key events or conversions.
- Paid: how many enquiries become customers, and what they are worth. Measured in your own records.
Seen and visited: Search Console
Search Console's performance report gives you four numbers:1
- Clicks: how many times people clicked through to your site from Google Search.
- Impressions: how many times your site appeared in search results.
- CTR: clicks divided by impressions.
- Average position: the average position of your topmost result.
The queries view shows which searches bring traffic, and the pages view shows which pages perform best and worst.1 Three cautions from Google: the newest data may be preliminary and can change over the next few hours, the totals in the chart can differ from the table, and when you search for yourself the result may not match what others see, because results vary by time, location, device and search history.1 That last one is why you should not judge your ranking by searching for yourself.
Asked: Analytics key events and ad conversions
In Google Analytics, a key event is an event that measures an action that is particularly important to your business, such as a form submission.2 Once you mark one, you can see how many people triggered it and which channels they came from.2
In Google Ads, a conversion is a valuable customer action that you define, and tracking it lets you see which keywords and ads perform best.3 You can create Google Ads conversions from Analytics key events so the two reports agree.2 I cover the setup in tracking website enquiries and conversion tracking in Google Ads.
Paid: your own records
No tool can tell you which enquiries became customers unless you tell it. Keep a simple sheet with one row per enquiry: date, source, what they wanted, outcome and value. A "how did you hear about us?" question on the form or first call catches the sources tracking misses.
The numbers worth calculating
- Enquiry rate: enquiries divided by website visits.
- Cost per enquiry: total marketing spend divided by enquiries.
- Close rate: customers divided by enquiries.
- Cost per customer: total marketing spend divided by new customers.
- Customer value: what an average customer is worth to you over time.
Cost per customer against customer value is the number that tells you whether marketing pays. As an illustration with made-up figures: if you spend $1,500 in a month, get 30 enquiries and win 6 customers, your cost per enquiry is $50 and your cost per customer is $250. Whether that is good depends on what a customer is worth.
A monthly scorecard
Write the same ten numbers in the same place each month:
- Search impressions, clicks and average position.
- Website visits.
- Enquiries, by source.
- Enquiry rate.
- Marketing spend.
- Cost per enquiry.
- New customers.
- Cost per customer.
- Revenue from new customers.
- One note: what you changed and what you will change next.
Common traps
- Chasing vanity numbers. Impressions and followers feel good but do not pay bills.
- Judging too early. Weekly swings are noise. Look at months.
- Changing too many things at once. You will not know what worked.
- Trusting averages. Look at which pages, keywords and sources drive results, not just the total.
- Forgetting offline results. Calls and word of mouth do not show up in Analytics unless you record them.
Get help setting it up
Measurement is part of every ads and web project I run, so you always know what is working. If you want a scorecard built for your business, say hello.
References
- Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup. Search Console Help.
- About key events. Google Analytics Help.
- About conversion measurement. Google Ads Help.