I get asked about ROI more than any other marketing question. And honestly, it’s the right question. If you’re a business owner spending money on marketing, you deserve to know what you’re getting back.

The problem is this. Most reporting in the market is either (a) confusing on purpose, or (b) filled with numbers that look impressive but don’t pay wages. Impressions. Reach. Clicks. Engagement. Cool. None of that makes it into your bank account.

So let me break down how I think about marketing ROI, what you should measure, and how to stop getting fed a report full of fluff.

ROI starts with one annoying truth: you need the basics first

Before we even talk ROI, we need to separate two things that get lumped together.

1) Core marketing assets

These are the things you need in place so marketing can work at all. Think:

• A website that actually functions
• Landing pages that match what you’re selling
• A capability statement or brochure
• Product sheets
• Brand messaging that makes sense

Business owners often ask, “What’s the ROI on a website?” and my answer is usually the same. If you’re just building a website and doing nothing else, you’ve basically built a billboard in the desert. No one sees it.

A website is not a strategy. It’s infrastructure. It’s the thing most campaigns ultimately rely on to convert.

2) Demand generation and lead generation

This is where ROI becomes measurable far faster. Paid search, Google Ads, paid social, radio, billboards, direct mail, account-based marketing. These are activities designed to generate an outcome, usually a lead.

If you want ROI quickly, you need demand generation activities. But if you want demand generation to work, you still need the assets.

That’s why the “when will I get ROI?” question is hard to answer without context. It depends what you’re doing, what you’re selling, and how the journey works in your industry.

Most marketing reports are stuffed with vanity stats

Let’s call it what it is. Vanity stats are numbers that look good on a dashboard but don’t tell you whether marketing is making you money.

Are they always useless? No. They can be leading indicators in the right context. But the issue I see all the time is business owners being handed a report where the headline is clicks and impressions, and the actual leads are buried somewhere in the fine print, or not tracked properly at all.

Here’s my rule.

If the purpose of your campaign is lead generation, your reporting should start with leads. Not reach. Not followers. Leads.

There are exceptions. We have clients where the objective is genuinely brand awareness and industry credibility. In those cases, the metric might be engagement or follower growth, but it has to be from the right people in the right locations. If you’re trying to be known in Perth and Singapore, and your follower growth is coming from random accounts in other countries, it’s noise.

So yes, even “likes” can be a real metric, but only when it matches the objective and the audience is correct.

The only lead metrics that matter

I’m going to simplify this aggressively because it should be simple.

As a business owner, there are only three conversion types I care about:

1. A form is filled in (contact, get a quote, book a consult)
2. A phone call happens
3. A purchase is made (if you sell online)

Everything else is a proxy.

And here’s where it gets messy. Many agencies will define “conversions” in ways that are technically true, but practically useless. I’ve seen reports boasting 40-plus “conversions” for businesses that would never realistically get 40 real leads in a month.

Then you look closer and the “conversion” is someone clicking the Contact page, or viewing a Staff Profile page.

That’s not a lead. That’s a website visit.

If a marketing company in Perth tells you they generated 44 conversions, your next question should be: “What did you count as a conversion?” If they can’t answer clearly, that’s a red flag.

Marketing qualified leads: the one metric to ask for

If you’re running demand generation or lead generation, the most important question you can ask your agency or marketer is:

How many marketing qualified leads did we generate this month?

That’s it.

An MQL is a lead that is real, relevant, and worth a sales follow-up. It’s not spam. It’s not a job seeker. It’s not an SEO salesperson trying to sell you SEO. It’s an enquiry that fits what you do.

If you ask for MQLs and you get resistance, excuses, or a bunch of jargon, you’re being managed. Find yourself another marketer.

Keep it stupidly simple: the spreadsheet beats the dashboard

Dashboards can be useful. But I’m going to be blunt. Most dashboards are built to look impressive, not to help you make decisions.

If you want clarity, start with a boring old spreadsheet. It should track:

• Who enquired (name, company)
• Contact details
• What they asked for
• Lead source (high level is fine)
• Is it qualified?
• What happened next (quoted, not quoted)
• If quoted, what value
• If won, what revenue

That’s it.

If most of your leads come in via phone calls, this is even more important. A phone call “conversion” is meaningless unless you know whether it was actually a quality lead.

In a perfect world, calls are recorded, transcribed, and tagged. At minimum, they’re reviewed and marked qualified or not qualified.

Because otherwise your “conversions” could be half spam and half tyre-kickers, and you’ll think marketing isn’t working when really you’re just measuring the wrong thing.

ROI depends on your sales cycle, not your marketer’s optimism

This is the part nobody wants to hear.

ROI timelines vary wildly.

I’ve seen campaigns generate qualified leads in days when the offer is simple, the audience is clear, and the channel matches the product. I’ve also seen B2B campaigns take eight months before a single meaningful account lands, because the sales cycle is longer and the trust barrier is higher.

A good example is account-based marketing. A direct mail campaign might require:

• Messaging strategy
• Landing pages
• Content and creative
• Photography
• Merchandise and fulfilment
• Target account selection
• Follow-up sequences

That takes time. But the payoff can be massive if the customer lifetime value is high. Accounting is a great example. If you win the right client and you’re good at what you do, they often stay for years. The return isn’t measured in the first month. It’s measured across the relationship.

So if someone promises you huge ROI “within a month” with no context, be sceptical. It’s possible. It’s just the least likely outcome for most service businesses.

The missing link: sales and marketing have to talk

This is the most underestimated part of marketing ROI.

Marketing can generate leads. But if sales doesn’t follow up properly, marketing gets blamed anyway.

In B2B especially, the relationship between marketing, business development, and sales is the whole game. I want to see a weekly meeting where the marketer and sales team go through:

• Which leads came in
• Which were qualified
• Which were junk and why
• Which were quoted
• Which were won

That feedback loop is where performance improves. It also stops you paying for the wrong leads.

Here’s a real-world example. If a paid search lead comes in asking for something you don’t even sell, that’s not just “a bad lead”. That’s a keyword problem. It should become an exclusion so you don’t pay for that mistake again.

You only learn that if someone on the sales side tells marketing what actually happened.

ROI is sometimes about the account, not the first purchase

This is where business owners can make smarter calls than their marketing report suggests.

Sometimes a lead looks unprofitable on day one. A small order. A low basket size. A cheap product.

But the right question is: who is the company?

If a large business makes a small first purchase, the win might not be the $17 order. The win is turning them into a repeat account through follow-up, service, and relationship building. That’s customer journey mapping in plain English.

Marketing creates the door. Sales has to walk through it.

What I’d ask your agency if you want ROI clarity

If you want one takeaway from this, it’s this.

If you’re running demand generation or lead generation campaigns, you should only have one headline metric: marketing qualified leads.

Then I’d ask:

• What does “conversion” mean in your reporting?
• How many MQLs did we get this month?
• What did each MQL cost to acquire?
• How many turned into sales qualified leads?
• How much was quoted, and how much was won?

Everything else is context. Useful, sometimes. But still context.

Marketing is super bloody logical. The problem is the industry is obsessed with acronyms and theatre. Don’t let anyone baffle you with bullshit.

If you’re paying for marketing, the question you’re allowed to ask is simple: “Am I making money from this?” And if the answer can’t be backed with clean lead data, you’ve found the problem.