A Warning to Marketers Everywhere: Don’t Make This Mistake

2026 update: I wrote this in 2015. The platforms have changed since (Twitter became X, LinkedIn took over B2B, TikTok and Instagram swallowed everything else), and attribution got messier. But the mistake hasn’t changed at all: marketers who report followers and traffic instead of leads and revenue are still the first ones cut when budgets get tight. I left the original story alone, folded in a related 2015 post about IndyCar sponsorships, and updated the tracking advice for how things work now. The mistake is simple: reporting numbers that don’t connect to money. If you can’t show how your marketing turns into leads and revenue, you’re asking your boss to value you on faith. Put a dollar value on a lead, track where your leads come from, and report that instead. Here’s how I learned to spot it.

The Conversation That Kills Me

There’s a game I can never win in public places where business gets done. I call it “Trying Not to Overhear Conversations After Forgetting to Bring My Headphones” (TNTOCAFTBMH for short). You may have just figured out that people don’t pay me for my naming skills. When I reluctantly overhear, I occasionally hear something brilliant. More often I hear something like this: Worker Person (WP): We had 20 more Twitter followers this month! Boss Person (BP): Oh, cool. How many did we have before? WP: 700. BP: Oh, okay. WP: This is the first month we’ve had new followers in a long time. I’m really happy with it. BP: Are they real people? WP: [hadn’t considered this] Oh, I don’t know. My feeling is that if the numbers go up, it doesn’t really matter. More is better. AND…SCENE! With my obnoxiously ROI-focused mind whirring, I started thinking about how I would have presented the same news back when I was an in-house marketer: Me: We had 20 more followers this month. BP: Oh, cool. How many did we have before? Me: 700. So it’s only about 3% growth, but it’s the first growth we’ve had in months. More importantly, we put tracking links on everything we shared, and three people who clicked through eventually became leads. We agreed a lead is worth $500 to us, so social contributed to $1,500 in leads. It’s not much, but it’s the first time we’ve been able to put a dollar value on social at all, and I plan to grow it. BP: I didn’t know we could tie social media to revenue. How did you do it? Me: I set up lead tracking in Google Analytics. We can see whether social brought in a lead directly, or played a part along the way, since people often visit from several sources before they reach out. BP: [jokingly] But if you can prove social is worth something, I can’t fire my social media person when times get hard. Me: I know. As the social media person, I think you’ve figured out my secret plan. AND…SCENE!

Tie Yourself to Revenue

Marketers, I urge you: tie yourself to revenue. It can be done, and it must be done. Otherwise you’re reporting things that don’t matter to someone who may like you a lot, but who reports revenue to their boss or board, not follower counts. Followers can be bought by the thousand for pocket change. Why should anyone care whether you added 10 or 5,000 if none of them help the business? The same goes for website traffic, which I wrote about in why more website traffic isn’t always better.

Start With These Two Questions

Here’s a quick way to see where you stand right now:

1. How much did you spend on digital marketing this month (email, paid ads, SEO, social, and so on)?
2. How many leads or dollars of revenue do you know came from that spending?

If the answer is zero leads or zero dollars, that does not mean you’re doing a bad job. What matters is that now you know, and you can change tactics. If you aren’t tracking this in Google Analytics or your CRM, how can you spend your budget wisely? Are you going on gut feel like a TV cop? “Spencer, I just have a feeling in my gut we’ll find the killer at the warehouse…” In marketing, gut feelings are out and measuring is in. And if I just called you a bad marketer, don’t worry. Needing to work on this is an acute problem, not a chronic one, and it can be fixed fairly quickly. I know this kind of tracking takes time and expertise to set up. Just remember how much easier knowing makes it to keep, and grow, your budget.

Why Marketers Avoid Being Tied to Revenue

You’re scared. There, I said it. And it’s understandable. You don’t control the sales process, so why should you answer for what sales does with your awesome leads? Because if you can tie your position to the revenue the company generates, you can show your value, and that makes everything easier. It also makes it much less likely you’ll be the first one let go when the company hits hard times because “marketing doesn’t really do that much anyway.”

How Do You Calculate What a Lead Is Worth?

The trick is agreeing on what a lead is worth. Then you’re not tied directly to closed revenue (which sales controls). You’re tied to the value of a lead based on historical data, which is far better than an arbitrary goal around traffic or followers. None of those have dollar signs, and none of them come up in board meetings (or if they do, nobody in the room knows what they mean). The math is simple:

1. For each lead source, find how much revenue it brought in over the last year.
2. Divide that by the number of leads from that source.
3. That’s what a lead from that source is worth.

Then get management to agree on the number. They need to be 100% on board that it wasn’t made up; it comes from your own numbers. Remember, they set quotas and budgets from historical data. You’re just doing the same thing for marketing. A reality check on the $500 number I keep using: it’s a fine illustration for a small service business, but lead value swings wildly by industry. I work with B2B and industrial clients where a single qualified lead can be worth $100,000 or more once it turns into a long-term contract. So don’t go find an industry average online. Look at what your business has actually closed. Build the number from your own data or it isn’t real.

Even an IndyCar Team Gets Asked for ROI

A few weeks after I first wrote this, the Indianapolis Business Journal ran a story on the cash woes facing IndyCar teams. Team owner Michael Andretti put it plainly: “Every company wants specifics on a return on investment. They want data and analytics to back up their spending. It creates a lot of pressure.” Proving the ROI of a sponsorship on the side of a race car really is hard. What always surprised me is how many companies don’t measure the marketing that’s far easier to track. Paid ads, SEO, email, and even TV, radio, and print (with a dedicated landing page, phone number, or offer code) can all be connected to analytics. Set it up once, review it regularly, and you can change course before sinking a lot of money into something that isn’t producing revenue. Unless you’re sponsoring an IndyCar, there’s not much excuse.

Attribution Is Harder in 2026

In 2015, attribution was annoying but doable: tracking links, Google Analytics goals, and a few CRM hooks, and you could see the path. Now it’s messier:

• Apple’s App Tracking Transparency requires apps to ask permission before tracking people (since iOS 14.5), which made a lot of paid social reporting much less complete.
• Google Analytics 4 replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data on July 1, 2023. Goals are now “key events,” and most old reports look different.
• Cookies behave differently by browser. Safari has blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020. Chrome planned to phase them out, then decided in 2025 to keep its current approach, so tracking now behaves differently depending on the browser.
• More buyers research with AI tools and then arrive at your site directly, with no referral data at all.

None of that is a reason to give up on attribution. It’s a reason to lean on the cleanest signal you still have: lead source captured when the form is submitted. Hidden form fields can record tracking parameters, the referrer, and the landing page with every lead, so you know where it came from even when the analytics picture is fuzzy. Pair that with forms and calls set up as key events in Analytics (here’s what small businesses should actually track in Google Analytics), and add a plain “How did you hear about us?” question for the leads that slip through.

The Next Conversation With Your Boss

Once you’ve done all this, you’ll know what a lead is worth to your organization, and so will your boss. Then you get to have a different kind of conversation: WP: I’d like a 12% raise. BP: We think you’re doing a great job, but raises just aren’t in the budget. WP: I understand it wasn’t in the original budget. Neither was the $88,000 in lead value I helped bring in over the last six months. BP: $88,000? Where did you get that number? WP: We agreed each lead is worth $500, and my work has brought in 176 more leads than we had at this point last year. [Shows data.] BP: Wow. I knew the last few months were good, but I thought a lot of that was the sales team’s extra effort. WP: Our lead value is based on last year’s marketing and sales data, so it assumes the same sales effort as last year. Whether their extra effort made the difference, we can’t say yet, but next year we can build it into the model. This year, as we agreed, a lead is worth $500, and my work ethic has also been tremendous. [Give them a winning smile and wait.] At this point you’ll learn a lot about the company and the boss you work for. Good luck, my marketing friend. You put your best foot forward and showed your worth, and I’d love to have someone like you working with me.

Where to Go Next

If your tracking isn’t set up yet, start with Google Analytics for small businesses; it covers which forms and calls to set up as key events so you have numbers to bring to the boss. If your reports are still built around traffic, why more website traffic isn’t always better is the same argument from the website side, with a hen that lays golden eggs. Our lead generation websites launch with form and call tracking set up, and our website data analysis service turns that data into plain-English recommendations. If you’ve ever sat in a leadership meeting and couldn’t answer “where did this lead come from,” get in touch or call (317) 855-8632. Sharp Guys Web Design is a WordPress web design and SEO agency in Fishers, Indiana. Since 2011 we’ve built more than 300 websites for businesses, nonprofits, and manufacturers, with a local team and zero outsourcing. More about us.