12 Data Checks Every Business Owner Should Run on Their Marketing

Why I start every account with the same hour

Before we change anything on a new account, I spend an hour in the client’s own tools running the same checks. Not because I expect to find fraud. Because on most accounts the measurement is broken in small ways that add up to a report nobody can trust, and fixing the measurement first is the only way to know if anything that follows worked.

You can run every one of these yourself. They need access to Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads if you run it, and your Business Profile. If you do not have access to those, that is check zero, and Amanda covered it in who owns your Google accounts.

Checks 1 to 4: is the measurement telling the truth

One: what counts as a lead. In Google Analytics, a key event is defined as “an event that measures an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business,” and you choose which events get marked. Open the key events list. If it is empty, nothing is being counted. If it includes page views or scrolls, the wrong things are being counted and every report built on it is inflated.

Two: are calls tracked. Most service businesses live on the phone, and a site with no call tracking is reporting maybe a third of its leads. Check whether the phone number on the site is a tracking number and whether calls appear in your analytics or ad account. Three: does the ad account count conversions. Google Ads conversion tracking lets you decide what is valuable, “like a purchase, sign-up, or phone call.” If the conversions column is zero or counts things that are not leads, the account is optimising toward the wrong thing. Four: are campaign links tagged. Google Analytics uses UTM parameters so “you can view which campaigns refer traffic.” Look at your traffic sources. If most of it says “direct” or “(not set),” the tagging is missing and you cannot tell what worked.

Checks 5 to 8: where the money goes

Five: the search terms report. In Google Ads, the search terms report shows “a list of search terms that a significant number of people have used, and that resulted in your ad being shown.” Read the last thirty days. Every search that is not a customer looking for what you sell is money leaving; Google’s own advice is that “if a search term isn’t relevant enough to the products or services you offer, add it as a negative keyword.” On the Colorado Springs account in our case studies, this one report was most of the seventy thousand dollars a year we took out.

Six: cost per lead by campaign rather than the account average. An account average hides the campaign that costs four times the others. Seven: spend by day and hour against when your phone is answered. Ads that run while nobody picks up are buying voicemails. Eight: the agency fee and the platform spend as two numbers. If your report blends them, you cannot judge either; the transparency post explains why Google’s rules require the split.

Checks 9 to 12: is search working

Nine: Search Console clicks, same month last year. Clicks are people who reached your site from Google; impressions are times you appeared. Compare this month to the same month last year rather than last month, because most trades are seasonal. If clicks are flat year over year after a year of “SEO,” something is wrong. Ten: which searches bring clicks. Sort the performance report by clicks and read the top twenty. If they are all your business name, the work has not reached the people who do not know you yet. Faith goes deeper on this in ranking for the wrong keywords.

Eleven: the Business Profile. Check the primary category, the services list, the last photo date and the last review reply. A profile that has not been touched in three months is a profile nobody is managing. Twelve: page speed on a phone. Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance asks for the main content to load within 2.5 seconds; test your home page and your busiest service page on a phone connection. A slow page turns paid clicks into bounces before anyone reads a word.

What the checks found on three real accounts

On the Colorado Springs foundation repair account, checks one, three and five failed together: Analytics counted page views as conversions, the ad account was optimising toward those, and the search terms report was full of DIY questions and other cities. Fixing the counting first meant the ads then had a true signal to learn from; cutting the searches took most of the seventy thousand dollars a year of waste out. The order mattered. Had we cut spend first, we would have been guessing which searches to cut.

On the Omaha moving account, checks nine and ten were the story. Search Console clicks were flat at around thirty a month and almost all of them were the business name. Nobody outside the existing customer base was reaching the site from search. That single finding set the plan: service pages and town pages for the searches people make before they know a mover’s name. Thirteen months later clicks were 341 a month and impressions had gone from about three thousand to twenty thousand. The case study has the month-by-month chart.

On a Lincoln venue with a brand-new site, every check started at zero, which is its own lesson: with nothing to measure, the first job is to build the measurement alongside the pages, so the first month of data is real. That site went from zero to more than seven hundred Google clicks a month, and we could say so with a straight face because check one was done on day one.

What to do with what you find

Most businesses fail four to six of these on the first pass. That is normal, and it is good news, because measurement problems are cheap to fix compared to strategy problems. The order matters: fix what counts as a lead and call tracking first (checks one to three), because every other number depends on them. Then the search terms report, because it saves money this week. Then the rest.

If you run the checks and want someone to go through the results with you, that is roughly what our free diagnostic is. Book it, and bring the list.

Making the checks a habit rather than a rescue

The hour is worth running once. It is worth more as a routine, because most of these numbers drift. A plugin update breaks the form tracking. A new campaign goes live without tags. Someone changes the Business Profile category while trying to be helpful. On our accounts the measurement checks run automatically every day, and the money and search checks are the agenda for the standing call each month, so a leak is caught in days rather than discovered at renewal time.

If you are running them yourself, put the first four on a monthly calendar reminder and the rest on a quarterly one. Each pass gets faster, because once the measurement is right most of the hour is reading rather than fixing. And keep the results in one place, so that in six months you can see whether the numbers moved rather than trying to remember.

The check behind the checks

The reason I run these myself rather than asking the previous agency is that every one of them can be made to look fine in a report. The question is not whether the report looks fine. It is whether you can open the source and see the same thing. If you can, the rest of the work has a foundation. If you cannot, start there, and do not spend another dollar on traffic until you can.