Digital marketing analytics: what to measure and what not to

Most marketing reports I see at clients are full of numbers you can’t base a single decision on. Impressions, reach, followers, sessions, clicks. There is a green arrow on the chart and the slide says growth was 34 percent.

Growth?

When I ask the head of the same company how many inquiries came in last month and how many of them turned into deals, there is a pause. Usually nobody knows exactly. Money goes out every month, but the return is a matter of gut feeling.

That is an expensive mistake. According to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, the marketing budget averages 7.8 percent of company revenue, and 56 percent of marketing leaders say it is not enough to execute their strategy. The sample consists of large international companies; for a smaller Estonian company the realistic range is more like 3 to 8 percent. But the conclusion is the same. When the budget is already tight, there is not a single euro to burn in a channel you don’t know is working.

Digital marketing analytics is not about setting up tools. It is an agreement about which numbers you move money based on.

Why the old metrics no longer work

For years the logic was simple. Visibility brings clicks, clicks bring inquiries, inquiries bring sales. The first link in that chain is now broken.

A Pew Research Center study analyzed 68,879 Google searches based on the web behavior of 900 US adults. When an AI summary appeared above the search results, users clicked on a link 8 percent of the time. Without an AI summary, the same figure was 15 percent. A source link inside the AI summary was clicked only 1 percent of the time. And 26 percent of people ended their browsing session entirely after seeing an AI summary, compared with 16 percent for regular results.

But the most important number in that study is a different one. An AI summary appeared for 18 percent of all searches, but for long queries the share was 53 percent, and for searches starting with a question word it was 60 percent. In other words, the more precisely your customer searches, the more likely they are to get their answer without ever reaching your site.

I see it in my own data. In Marketing Sharks’ Search Console report for the last 90 days, there are six such long, sentence-like queries, for example “which seo agencies deliver the best results for organic traffic in estonia”. A total of 1,862 impressions. Positions 2.1 to 9.4. Clicks: zero.

In the old logic, this report is a disaster. Eighteen hundred impressions in first-page positions and not a single click. In the new logic, it is something else entirely. Those impressions mean our site was visible in the search results for those queries. The person got their answer right there, and if they did reach us, they came later directly, via a branded search or by phone.

If your metric is the click, a week like that will convince you that marketing isn’t working. And you will switch off exactly the thing that is working.

Three questions your analytics must answer

Before you touch a single tool, write down these three questions. If your current report doesn’t answer them, you don’t need more data. You need a different report.

1. How much does one inquiry cost? Monthly marketing spend divided by the number of qualified inquiries.
2. What share of inquiries turns into deals? This number belongs to sales, not marketing, but without it you can’t know whether to put more money into marketing.
3. How much does one customer cost and how much do they bring in? Customer acquisition cost compared with the average deal size.

Simple back-of-the-envelope logic. If ad spend is 2,000 euros a month and it produces 8 qualified inquiries, an inquiry costs 250 euros. If one in four inquiries becomes a customer, a customer costs 1,000 euros. If the average deal is 6,000 euros and the margin is 30 percent, you earn 1,800 euros in gross profit per customer. That is a working system, and it deserves more money.

But if the average deal is 900 euros, you are 100 euros in the red on every new customer, and a pretty green arrow in the report doesn’t change that.

That same calculation is why I recommend fixing your existing measurement before opening a new channel. There is no point arguing over the cost of digital marketing if you don’t know what your current euro brings back.

Six steps to get your measurement in order

1. Start with money, not with a tool. Write down on paper which event on your site is actually worth money. For most Estonian B2B companies it is a completed inquiry form or a phone call, not a price list download. Everything else is a supporting metric. If you can’t put it in one sentence, there is no point opening Google Analytics.

2. Count each conversion only once. The most common mistake I see in accounts is the same inquiry in three places. Submitting the form is one conversion, viewing the thank-you page is a second, clicking the button is a third. The report shows 24 conversions, the inbox has 8 emails. Pick one event that counts. Mark the others as supporting metrics.

3. Connect the form to your CRM and count the inquiries by hand once a month. Twice a year, do a simple check together with sales. Take the month’s inquiries and mark next to each row whether it became a quote and whether it became a deal. That one hour of work gives you more information than the entire rest of the report. And it usually reveals that 40 percent of the “conversions” were spam bots or job seekers.

4. Ask the buyer directly where they came from. Add one optional field to your inquiry form: “How did you hear about us?” The answers are not precise, but they are the only thing that reveals the channels no system measures. A recommendation, a podcast, a LinkedIn post, a ChatGPT answer. According to Nielsen’s 2025 ROI report, 85 percent of marketers say they can measure ROI, but only 32 percent actually measure it across all channels at once. The gap between those two numbers is exactly what the tool doesn’t show.

5. Count visibility and clicks separately. Search Console has two columns that now live lives of their own. Impressions tell you whether the machine knows you. Clicks tell you whether a human chose you. If impressions grow and clicks don’t, that is no longer automatically bad news. Check whether direct visits and branded searches grew at the same time. I wrote about this shift at greater length in the article “How the new search engines are changing the rules of the game”.

6. Limit the report to three numbers. A report with thirty metrics is not thorough, it is a way of dodging accountability. When everything is important, nobody is responsible for anything. Pick three numbers you will move money based on next month. Put the rest in an appendix.

What a metric shows and what it doesn’t

The bottom two rows are the ones decisions are made on. The top five are diagnostics. They tell you where the plumbing leaks, but they don’t tell you whether the business works.

Where money leaks most often

I often see clients paying 1,500 euros a month for ads to a site whose inquiry form is broken or whose phone number isn’t clickable on mobile. That is not a marketing problem, it is a measurement problem, because nobody ever looked at what happens after the click.

I always start with three places.

The form doesn’t arrive. Check your inquiry form yourself once a quarter. Send a test inquiry and see whether the email arrives and how quickly someone responds. I have seen a form that was broken for four months. Four months of ad money that went straight into the void.

Speed eats conversions. If the page takes more than three seconds to load on mobile, part of the budget is already gone before anyone sees your offer. You can check this yourself for free. Start with a website audit.

Sales doesn’t respond fast enough. If the inquiry comes in on Monday and the quote goes out on Thursday, the channel isn’t bad. The competitor was simply faster. Marketing brings the customer to the door, but sales closes the deal.

What to ask your partner

If you already have a marketing partner, there are three questions whose answers show fairly precisely who you are dealing with.

Ask what the one number is by which they judge their own work. Ask whether you can see the data yourself without having to wait for the end of the month. Ask how many inquiries came in last month and how many of them were real. If the answer is a slide with reach on it, you have your answer.

Our own clients have a daily updated digital marketing view for this, where traffic, rankings, campaigns and AI search visibility are all in one place. Not because it looks nice, but because the monthly report always arrives three weeks after the decision should have been made. The same logic applies to a single channel too, for example our SEO service, where results take months and the interim numbers have to show whether the direction is right.

If you are still choosing a partner, also read the articles “What to ask a digital marketing agency before signing a contract” and “What is actually done for an SEO monthly fee”.

Frequently asked questions

What is digital marketing analytics?

Digital marketing analytics is the measurement and interpretation of marketing activities in a way that lets you make budget decisions based on them. It is not just setting up Google Analytics. It is an agreement on which numbers count as results, where those numbers come from and who looks at them every month.

How much does digital marketing measurement cost?

The basic setup, i.e. analytics, conversions and Search Console, is usually a one-time job in Estonia in the range of 500 to 1,500 euros, depending on the number of channels and whether a CRM integration is needed. The tools themselves are mostly free. The bigger cost comes from someone actually reading those numbers. That work is usually included in the monthly fee. See also our overview of digital marketing pricing.

Why do Google Analytics and Facebook show different numbers?

Because they count differently. The ad platform credits itself with a conversion even when the person only saw the ad and didn’t click. Analytics mostly attributes the conversion to the channel the visitor last came through. The exact split depends on the attribution model you choose. Cookie consent cuts off part of the journey. Don’t try to reconcile these numbers. Pick one system as your official truth. Use the other only for campaign optimization.

Does asking for cookie consent ruin measurement?

Partly, yes. Some visitors don’t give consent, and their journey isn’t measured. That is exactly why it matters that your official number is the count of real inquiries in your inbox or CRM, not the count of analytics events. No cookie affects your inbox.

How long do you have to wait before the numbers say anything?

With Google Ads you can see the direction within a couple of weeks. With SEO and content, the honest range is 3 to 6 months before the result is distinguishable from noise. If you get fewer than 20 inquiries a month, don’t draw conclusions from a single month, because chance is bigger than the numbers at that point.

How do you measure visibility in AI search?

There is currently no complete metric for traffic coming from AI search, because according to Pew Research Center, a link inside an AI summary is clicked only 1 percent of the time. There are three indirect signs. First, growth in impressions for long, sentence-like queries in Search Console. Second, growth in direct visits and branded searches. Third, a simple manual check. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity about your service and see who they name.

Which numbers should a marketing partner show every month?

The number of qualified inquiries, the cost per inquiry and what was learned from last month’s experiments. Everything else is extra. If the monthly view has thirty metrics and none of them is an inquiry, the report was written to make an impression, not to support a decision.

Summary

Measuring marketing will get harder in the coming years, not easier. Part of the measurement data is gone because of consent requirements, part of the clicks are eaten by AI search, and the buyer’s journey increasingly runs through places no system can see. That is a risk, because a decision made on a bad metric is more expensive than not measuring at all.

But there is also an opportunity here. Most of your competitors are still looking at clicks and followers. If you know exactly what your inquiry costs and what your customer costs, you can move money faster than they can.

My advice is simple: don’t buy more marketing until you know what your current euro brings back. Pick three numbers, put them on paper and demand that they are on the table in every conversation.

If you don’t currently know what your inquiry costs, start there. Marketing Sharks offers a free digital marketing audit, where we review your visibility, ad accounts and customer journey and tell you honestly where the biggest room for growth is. No obligation and no sales pitch.