Most business owners judge their marketing by a number on a report. This is about why a report full of green can quietly hide a problem — and the one question that catches it.
Leads this month. Cost per lead. A conversion rate. The report comes back looking healthy, everyone nods, and the budget rolls on for another quarter. It feels like the responsible way to run things.
Sometimes it is. But the number that’s easiest to celebrate is often the one hiding the problem. This is the plain-English version of a longer piece I wrote for The Brand Ledger — if you want the full argument, with the Nike and Airbnb stories in detail, it’s here.
A number stops being useful the moment it becomes the goal
An economist called Charles Goodhart summed the whole thing up in a single line.
it stops being a good measure.
The moment a number becomes the goal, people start working to move the number — not the business underneath it. The number keeps climbing. The thing it was supposed to stand for quietly stops keeping pace. Green report, flat business.
The easy numbers end up running the strategy
Marketing has the easiest numbers in the building to count — clicks, cost per lead, a conversion rate. Because they’re easy to count, they end up steering the whole budget. And most of them measure activity, not growth.
Here’s the distinction that matters. Being seen by people who already know you isn’t growth — it’s you paying to reach an audience you already had. Reaching people who don’t know you yet is growth. Most reports can’t tell the two apart, so the money drifts toward whatever’s easiest to count, which is almost always the customers you already owned.
The clearest proof is Airbnb. During the pandemic it switched its ads off almost entirely and kept 95% of its traffic — evidence the ads had spent years taking credit for people who were coming anyway.
Growth is the demand you don’t have yet.
A recent example from our own work
A paid search account that looked perfect
A care group came to us with a Google Ads account that looked excellent on paper — high conversion rate, low cost per enquiry, a report full of green. Then we looked at where the money was actually going. Around 90% of the budget was bidding on the group’s own name.
When someone Googles a care home by name, they already know it, and they’ve usually already decided to enquire. The ad wasn’t winning that person — it was intercepting someone who was coming anyway, often one who’d have clicked the free listing sitting right underneath.
So we kept a small amount defending the brand name, and my paid specialist pointed the rest at families searching for care who’d never heard of the group — “residential care” and “dementia care” in the towns that mattered. Colder audiences, a lower conversion rate, but real, new demand.
The conversion rate looked worse. The business got better. We were now talking to people who didn’t already know the group, so the flattering number dipped — but qualified enquiries, from families who’d never otherwise have found the homes, rose by nearly a quarter, on the same spend.
Run a care home?
That’s a live example of the work we do for care groups — turning paid search, local SEO and content into qualified admissions enquiries rather than vanity metrics. If your own report looks green but the enquiries aren’t landing, we can show you where the spend is really going.
You don’t need new software. You need one question.
Ask whoever runs your marketing — an agency, an employee, or yourself:
If the honest answer is “the numbers would look worse,” you’ve found it. A metric that only holds up while you’re paying to reach your existing audience isn’t measuring your marketing. It’s measuring how well-known you already are — and quietly charging you to find that out.
Measure the business, not the platform. That’s the whole idea in a line. The full essay goes deeper if you want it, and I’ve written elsewhere about why awareness is a side-effect, not the goal.
Run a services-based business?
The same principle holds whatever you sell: most marketing budgets quietly over-invest in the audience you already have. We work as a fractional marketing partner to owner-managed businesses, tying every pound of spend to a real commercial outcome — not a report full of green.
Questions People Ask
