The measurement check I run before I touch the advertising

When a company brings me in to run its advertising, the first thing I look at is not the advertising. It is the counting.

Advertising is judged by its numbers: what it cost, what came in, what each enquiry cost. If those numbers are wrong, every decision made with them is wrong too, and wrong in a way nobody can see, because the dashboard still looks like a dashboard. So before I change a bid, a budget or a campaign, I find out what is actually being measured. It comes before the plan, because the plan is written from those numbers.

Here is what the check covers.

1. Where the enquiries land

I start at the end of the journey, not the beginning. I send an enquiry through every route the site offers: the form, the email address, the phone number on a phone. Then I follow each one. Does it arrive? Does a person see it? Is it counted anywhere?

The shapes I find most often are dull ones. A form whose notifications go to someone who left. A form that says thank you while the message goes nowhere. A phone number in the advertising that nobody can tie back to the advertising. None of these shows up in the analytics, because the analytics only sees what it was told to see.

2. What counts as an enquiry

Next, what the analytics and the advertising accounts call a conversion, and when they count it.

This is where the numbers drift. A conversion counted when someone presses Send, whether or not the message went through. A conversion counted on a thank-you page that people reload. Two tags counting the same enquiry, so every one is two. A conversion that was set up in the analytics but never marked as the one that matters, so the advertising is being steered by something else entirely.

The advertising platforms learn from the conversions you feed them. Feed them the wrong ones and they will find you more of the wrong thing, efficiently. That is why this comes before any change to the campaigns.

3. Whether consent works the way the site says it does

Most sites now ask visitors whether they may be tracked. I check that the answer does what the banner says: that the tags which need a yes wait for one, and that Reject changes something.

This goes wrong in both directions. A banner that loads the tags before anyone has answered counts people who then say no, and breaks the promise the site has just made them. A banner set up so strictly that the analytics sees only a slice of visitors leaves the numbers right but partial, and nobody knows which slice. Either way, the monthly figures cannot be read at face value until it is put right.

4. Who holds the keys

Last, the accounts themselves: the analytics, the tag manager, the advertising accounts and the website platform. Whose name are they in? Who can change them? Are the analytics and the advertising linked, and do they agree about what an enquiry is?

I work inside a client's own accounts as a user they invite, and everything stays in their name. Where an account is in someone else's name, such as an agency that has moved on, getting it back comes first, because nothing measured in an account you cannot reach is really yours.

What I fix first

The order is the same every time. First, enquiries arriving where someone will see them. Then each enquiry counted once, at the moment it is actually received. Then consent working as the site says it does. Only then the advertising.

What you get from it is a short written note: what is measured, what is not, what I changed, and what that means for the numbers you have been looking at until now. Figures from before the fix are often not comparable with figures after it, and it is better to know that than to compare them. That note becomes the first lines of the monthly page.

A worked example: this site

This site says what it counts. How this site measures itself sets out what is counted and what is not. A visit is counted without a cookie and without asking, with nothing that recognises you from one day to the next; the detailed analytics and the advertising tags wait for Accept. And an enquiry is counted once, and only when it has been stored, not when someone presses the button.

If you suspect your numbers

If the numbers you are given do not match what you see coming in, that is usually the counting, not the market. The first month on my marketing page sets out the order I work in. Or send me a link to your site and I will tell you what I can see from the outside, as a quick written look, free.