9 Marketing Metrics Derbyshire Business Owners Should Actually Track (And 5 to Ignore)

Last updated: 28 August 2026

Most marketing dashboards show forty numbers and answer none of the questions that actually matter. Here are the nine metrics worth your attention, and five you can safely stop checking.

The 9 to track

1. Enquiries by source

Knowing not just how many enquiries you got but where each one came from, Google, social, referral, an old blog post, is the single most useful number in your entire marketing operation. Everything else supports understanding this one. Core to Test & Measure.

Do this: Tag every enquiry with its source in your CRM, even a simple manually-added tag beats none.

2. Cost per enquiry by channel

Two channels can look equally busy while one costs three times as much per genuine enquiry. Without this number, budget tends to drift toward whatever feels most active rather than what's actually cheapest, worth checking against your paid ads spend specifically.

Do this: Divide monthly spend on each channel by the enquiries it generated, review it monthly, not annually.

3. Enquiry-to-customer conversion rate

A flood of enquiries that never convert points at a sales process problem, not a marketing one, and vice versa. This number tells you which half of the funnel actually needs attention, and it lives in your CRM.

Do this: Log every enquiry's outcome, won, lost, why, and review the rate monthly.

4. Repeat customer rate

New customer acquisition gets all the attention, but repeat business is usually cheaper and more profitable. A falling repeat rate is often an early warning sign that gets missed because it's a quiet number, not a dramatic one.

Do this: Calculate what percentage of this quarter's revenue came from existing customers, and watch the trend.

5. Website conversion rate, not just traffic

Traffic going up while enquiries stay flat means more people are visiting a website that isn't converting them, which is a website problem dressed up as a marketing win.

Do this: Track enquiries divided by visitors monthly, not just the visitor number on its own.

6. Review volume and rating trend

A slow decline in review rating or a stall in review volume rarely shows up anywhere else until it's already affecting bookings. It's an early-warning metric most businesses only check on their Google Business Profile when there's already a problem.

Do this: Check your review count and average rating monthly, not just when someone mentions a bad one.

7. Time to first response

How quickly you respond to a new enquiry is one of the strongest predictors of whether it converts, and it's rarely measured. A great offer answered three days late loses to a mediocre one answered in ten minutes, a basic Lead Generation discipline.

Do this: Track average response time to new enquiries and aim to get it under an hour during business hours.

8. Search visibility for your actual target keywords

Ranking well for a keyword nobody searches for isn't visibility, it's a vanity number. Tracking your position for the specific terms your real customers use, checkable on our own SEO Scorecard, is what actually matters.

Do this: Check your ranking for your ten most valuable search terms monthly, not a generic report of hundreds of keywords.

9. AI citation visibility

A growing share of buying research now happens inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, not classic search results. Not knowing whether your business gets mentioned there at all is a fast-growing blind spot, checkable with our AI Visibility Tool.

Do this: Check your AI visibility with a proper tool at least monthly, this space moves fast.

The 5 to ignore

1. Follower count on its own

A large following with no engagement or enquiries is a vanity number that says nothing about business impact. Ten genuinely engaged followers beat ten thousand passive ones, a trap plenty of Social Media activity falls into.

Instead: Track engagement and enquiries generated, not the follower total.

2. Total website visitors with no context

Traffic on its own tells you nothing about quality. A spike from an unrelated viral post looks great on a dashboard and means nothing for the business.

Instead: Pair any traffic number with a conversion or source breakdown before drawing a conclusion from it.

3. Vanity keyword rankings

Ranking first for a keyword with ten searches a month feels good and changes nothing for the business. It's easy to chase precisely because it's an easy number to move, worth checking against your genuine SEO priorities.

Instead: Focus tracking on keywords tied to real buying intent, even if the ranking is harder to shift.

4. Email open rate alone

Open rate has become an unreliable metric since privacy features in most email clients now auto-open messages in the background. Treating it as gospel means chasing a number that barely reflects reality anymore, worth knowing if you run a newsletter.

Instead: Weight click-through and reply rate more heavily than open rate.

5. Generic industry benchmarks

"The average conversion rate in your industry is X%" rarely accounts for your specific business, location, or price point. Comparing yourself to your own trend over time is more useful than comparing to a generic average.

Instead: Track your own trend month over month rather than chasing an industry-wide number that may not apply to you.

What to do with this list

These are the same numbers we build into every BIG12 audit and ongoing reporting. Getting the right metrics in front of you is half the battle, one legal sector client saw an 891% increase in monthly sessions once they knew what to actually track and act on.

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