Is your marketing aiming for the right target?

How do you hold your marketing team accountable for their efforts?

How you hold your marketing team accountable determines company results. Setting the wrong goals risks making your marketing seem ineffective, even if the work is strong.

Here are several ways I’ve seen companies measure the results of their marketing efforts- and the pitfalls they encountered due to an incorrect focus for their efforts.

Recognizing common pitfalls in marketing measurement ensures you stay focused on what truly drives results rather than what simply appears productive.

Business’ Bottom Line

One client came to me who was obsessed with their email marketing. Email is an under-appreciated marketing strategy (often overshadowed by more glamorous channels), but it still works very well. When they asked me to help with this, it made sense, and I got to work.

Problems arose quickly. The client’s intense focus on email design left us with little time for other marketing opportunities.

After analyzing the analytics, it became clear that two-thirds of their sales came from organic search, with only a small portion resulting from email. The data was so surprising to this customer that they refused to accept it.

Then I realized the problem (well, one of them): they were judging their marketing efforts by their bottom line, profitability. Since the only thing they were actively doing was email, they assumed it was driving the revenue. However, the data didn’t lie- which meant they were missing a huge opportunity by focusing time and energy on something that wasn’t significantly increasing their income.

They are to be commended for doing something many other companies don’t: focus on income generated by their marketing. But they were lucky: they remained profitable despite incomplete information about why. If they suddenly stopped being profitable, they could have spent valuable time and money before they understood what was going wrong.

Number of Things Done

I wish I had a magic wand that I could wave and get more business for my customers. Alas, I’ve not yet found one. Instead, to get marketing results, I have to do something!

For many clients, this translates into a certain number of articles (a month, for instance). While I believe that blogging (especially in the age of AI chatbots) is a very productive strategy, when you merely judge the effectiveness of your marketing on the number of articles written, you can quickly run into problems.

I recently ran into this for a client who agreed to an active blogging strategy. This company worked in a highly specialized field with complex technical details. Since my writers are generalists, they tasked their employees with writing an article for the website every few months.

Unfortunately, because the goal was the number of articles, employees began submitting AI-generated content simply to meet their quotas. In their view, they had completed the task, but for me, it remained incomplete: we cannot publish AI content if we want AI chatbots to recognize and recommend us.

This problem existed before AI-generated articles: setting a quota of “X articles a month” leads to difficulty finding fresh topics and declining quality. Writers may cut corners to meet goals, causing repeated or plagiarized content. Plagiarism checkers can spot and help mask duplication. Google’s “Helpful Content Update” addresses this issue in its algorithm.

This challenge extends beyond articles. As link building regains attention in SEO, it’s easy to focus on quantity rather than quality. Prioritizing the number of links can lead to lower-quality results. At best, Google often ignores bad links; in the worst cases, it may penalize the site.

Focusing solely on quantifiable outputs in marketing inevitably leads to quality issues and undermines results.

Website Data

Smart marketers don’t judge their efforts by the number of things done, but by the outcomes. For this, many data sources provide valuable information.

However, with so much website data available, it’s easy to misinterpret results. Focus your analysis on the metrics that clearly indicate real progress toward marketing goals.

I once worked with a company that used SEMRush traffic data to determine whether their marketing efforts were working. They saw that SEMRush said their traffic was increasing, so everything must be going great. Problems began when SEMRush started reporting declining traffic. No matter what they did, they couldn’t reverse the course.

However, the problem they were facing was not really about traffic. It was about the sample size. SEMRush (and other similar third-party tools) bases its traffic data on projections. While they were getting started, there wasn’t a sufficient sample size to report on traffic, so it looked good. However, as they grew, the sample size improved, and the data were reported more accurately, which then appeared to be down. That wasn’t the case. Instead, it showed how inflated and inaccurate the earlier sampled data was.

It might not get better with paid marketing efforts. Companies look at data in their Facebook or Google Ads and see success, so they keep paying for ads. I’m convinced that paid ads providers make most of their money from businesses that think their ads are working- even if they are not generating additional business.

The problem here is that these paid metrics often are designed to make it look like the campaign is working, whether or not it’s actually bringing you additional business. Facebook loves to show you big numbers like “impressions” or “reach” to make it feel like it’s worth spending money with them. Google Ads works the same way, even giving you an “optimization score” that social-engineers you into earning a 100% score, which really only means you’re spending more money, even if that additional spend does not produce more business.

Modern web marketing should focus on the right data: tracking as closely as possible to the income generated by your marketing efforts. Understanding which marketing activities drive revenue or leads lets you make informed decisions and improve results.

You can find this information, but these platforms make it hard to do so. You will need to take extra steps to measure the success of your efforts. Sometimes it involves involving a developer- and I know marketing teams and web developers don’t always get along. Push through those difficulties, so you can know your marketing is working. In fact, I suspect that many of these platforms make this hard, so they will keep your attention on metrics that make their platform look good.

How do you really know if your marketing is working?

To truly know whether your marketing is working, don’t rely solely on your bottom line, completed tasks, or appealing third-party metrics. Clarify what matters most for your company’s growth.

The answer: use a web analytics package to see if your company’s marketing is working.

My recommendation has always been Google Analytics. Not only is it free and powerful, but it’s easy to set up. With its data, you know real information about how people find your website and how much money you’re making from your efforts.

Once you have this information, you can put the other things we discussed into context:

Are we making money from our efforts? The bottom line of any marketing campaign is that it’s making money for your company. However, merely looking at your bottom line is not enough. You need to know which marketing efforts are generating that income- so you can allocate time to what actually matters. Google Analytics can help you with this.

Are we doing enough? Are we doing the right things? You have to do something to get somewhere with your marketing campaign. Don’t just focus on things done. Google Analytics can help you learn what, or if, your efforts are making a difference.

Are the things we’re measuring actually accurate and helping our business to grow? With Google Analytics, you can not only see how real people are interacting with your website, but also whether those people are doing things that actually make you money.

I’m convinced that the real problem behind these ineffective marketing goals is approaching digital marketing as if it were traditional marketing. Traditional marketing struggles to measure its success. If you approach digital marketing in the same way, you have to find other ways to gauge your efforts. However, the power of digital marketing is knowing exactly what your marketing is accomplishing. If you’re doing digital marketing, you can know whether or not your efforts are helping grow your bottom line- so hold your marketing team to that, as your final goal.