---
title: Marketing Measurement
summary: Move past vanity metrics to the five marketing KPIs that reveal what is actually driving revenue.
est_minutes: 6
sort: 6
---

You have spent five modules building a marketing system.

You have an audit baseline. A behavioral profile. A channel plan. A content architecture. A campaign brief.

The question this module answers is: how do you know if any of it is working?

Most operators answer that question by looking at the wrong numbers.

Follower count. Reach. Impressions. Post likes. Video views.

None of those are business metrics. They are platform metrics. Platforms measure what happens on them. They do not measure what happens in your business as a result.

The gap between platform metrics and business results is where most marketing feels like it is working when it is not, and why operators keep investing in channels that are not producing revenue.

This module closes that gap.

**Vanity Metrics vs. Decision Metrics**

A vanity metric makes you feel good. A decision metric tells you what to do next.

Vanity metrics include follower count, impressions, reach, post engagement, and video views. These numbers go up when you post consistently and go down when you stop. They respond to volume. They do not directly respond to the quality of your positioning, the strength of your message, or the efficiency of your marketing spend.

Decision metrics tell you whether your marketing is actually producing what a business needs: qualified leads, booked calls, paid customers, and revenue you can attribute back to a specific channel or campaign.

The shift from tracking vanity metrics to tracking decision metrics is the operational maturity shift this module installs.

You are not abandoning platform data. You are putting it in its correct position: as context for understanding reach, not as evidence of marketing effectiveness.

**The Five Marketing KPIs That Actually Matter**

Five metrics. Each one answers a specific question about your marketing system. Each one tells you where to look when results are off.

KPI one: Cost Per Lead.

What does it cost, in time and money, to generate one qualified lead from each channel? This is not cost per click or cost per impression. It is the total investment, divided by the number of people who took a meaningful next step: booked a call, submitted an inquiry, or entered your email sequence. If you do not know your cost per lead by channel, you do not know which channels are worth investing in.

KPI two: Lead Quality Score.

Not all leads are equal. A lead quality score is a simple rating you assign to each lead based on how closely they match your behavioral profile. You can use a basic three-point scale: one for poor fit, two for moderate fit, three for strong fit. Track this over time and by channel. A channel that produces a high volume of low-quality leads is less valuable than a channel that produces fewer but better-qualified prospects. Volume is not the goal. Quality is.

KPI three: Conversion Rate by Channel.

What percentage of people who engage with a specific channel take the next step? Track this separately for each channel in your plan. A channel with a high reach but a low conversion rate is an audience-building channel. A channel with a smaller reach but a high conversion rate is a revenue-generating channel. Both have value. Knowing which is which tells you where to invest more and what each channel is actually doing in your system.

KPI four: Customer Acquisition Cost.

What does it cost in total marketing spend, including time and paid budget, to acquire one paying customer? This is the most important marketing metric for a business. It tells you whether your marketing is profitable at the unit level. If your customer acquisition cost is higher than the revenue a customer generates, no amount of volume will fix the math. This number needs to go down over time as your system becomes more efficient.

KPI five: Marketing-Attributed Revenue.

How much revenue can you directly connect to your marketing activity? This does not require perfect attribution software. It requires a consistent habit of asking new customers how they found you and recording the answer. Over 90 days, a clear picture emerges: which channels are generating revenue-producing customers and which are generating activity without financial impact.

**Building Your Marketing Dashboard**

A marketing dashboard is not a complicated analytics tool. It is a single document you update once a month with five numbers, one for each KPI, by channel.

The dashboard has one job: to tell you, at a glance, which channels are producing qualified leads at an acceptable cost, and which ones are producing activity without results.

You already have most of the data you need. Your Module 01 audit captured your current channel baseline. Your Module 04 content health check captured your pre-architecture content metrics. Your Module 05 campaign briefs captured post-campaign results.

The dashboard connects those data points into a monthly review that takes 30 minutes and produces the decisions that improve your marketing system one planning cycle at a time.

That is the system. Six modules. An audit, a behavioral profile, a channel plan, a content architecture, a campaign brief, and a measurement dashboard.

Each module built on the last. Each worksheet feeds the next. None of it is theory. All of it is operational.

**Your Action Step**

Your worksheet for this module is the Marketing KPI Dashboard.

It walks you through setting up your five KPIs by channel, connecting your Module 01 baseline to your current metrics, and building the monthly review rhythm that keeps your marketing system improving over time.

You now have a complete, documented marketing system. Not a content calendar. Not a posting schedule. A system: built on who your customer actually is, where they actually are, what they actually need to hear, and how to measure whether your marketing is doing its job.

Most business owners never build this. They post. They hope. They wonder why the results are inconsistent.

You built it.

Now run it. Measure it. Improve it.
