How To Know Your Marketing Is Working (Before Revenue Shows Up)

You're three months into a $3,000/month SEO campaign.

Traffic is flat and your accountant is asking questions. Your spouse doesn’t outright say you’re wasting money, but they have questions that you don’t know how to answer.

So what do you do here? Stop throwing good money after bad, or keep the course?

Revenue and profit are the ultimate marketing metrics, and that’s undeniable. After all, a business isn’t much of a business if it doesn’t make money. And a marketing plan isn’t much of a marketing plan if it doesn’t get you close to doing that.

But there’s a delay between taking marketing actions and getting results. And it’s this delay that creates intense anxiety during the gap between. How are you supposed to rest easy watching cash flow out while the bank account stays flat?

Smoke predicts fires. Tremors predict earthquakes. And so too, do lead indicators predict revenue.

In this post, I’m not going to give you magic metrics that predict the future perfectly. Rather, I’m going to help you find the evidence you need to make confident decisions instead of uninformed guesses.

By the end of this post, you’ll know which metrics matter for your business type, how you can read them, and how much time they take to bear fruit.

And to do that, you’ll first need to understand this important concept.

Lead indicators are based on inputs that you control right now. That is, website traffic, mailing list size, keyword rankings, phone calls, form fills, and your sales pipeline.

Lag indicators are based on outputs that you measure later. This would be things like revenue, customer acquisition cost, profit margin, and customer lifetime value.

There’s a chain of causality that plays out here that looks like this:

Marketing activity → visibility → engagement → sales pipeline → revenue

Each step predicts the next. Revenue is the end of the chain, and it’s the most important. If you don’t get the revenue you need within an appropriate timeline, you have to look farther back in the chain to figure out why.

But likewise, if you just started up a new kind of marketing activity, you don’t want to cut off your experiment too early. Doing that is like getting mad at a cucumber seed for not giving you ripe vegetables a week after being put in soil.

A lot of marketing is about running experiments. And while it’s very important to be disciplined with your marketing spending, it’s equally important to be disciplined about letting experiments run as long as they need to.

But that said, lead indicators can help you spot issues early and prevent you from wasting money on a badly designed experiment.

Every business needs to optimize for different metrics and set their own benchmarks. This is just good long-term strategic practice.

But what about when you’re triaging marketing or you’re in the slow waiting period? And what if you don’t have the kind of first-party data that I speak so glowingly about?

Here’s what you can watch to make sure nothing is going off the rails. Use this to inform your general sense of direction, and adjust based on what you’re seeing from there.

Click-through rate (CTR) is your first warning system. This is the percentage of people who see what you are advertising, and then choose to click on it. You want this number to be high because it suggests that you’re reaching the right people with the right message.

Industry benchmarks vary dramatically by sector. For example, legal averages 4.76% while eCommerce sits at 2.19%. And if you start digging into subcategories of those sectors, you’ll see even different statistics.

If you’re well above the general average, that’s a good sign. If you’re well below the general average after about a week, tweak your messaging or your audience.

Keyword positions predict traffic. And that makes perfect sense because high keyword positions on keywords that people are searching for means that you’re going to be highly visible to the searchers.

Similarly, a good position is a sign that your messaging is a good fit, because Google and other search engines don’t tend to reward pages that aren’t engaging with high positions in the results.

Backlinko says that position #1 in Google gets 27.6% of clicks, with position #2 getting 15%, and position #3 getting 11%. The farther down you go, the lower the percentage gets.

Keyword positions change a lot, and often far faster than traffic. If you use Position Tracking in SEMRush or any similar tool, you’ll see this happen.

The trick is to push as many keywords as possible on to page 1 (positions 1-10). The easiest place to start are keywords where you’re ranking 11-20, since small optimizations can often push you up quite a bit higher.

Keep in mind, SEO is a long game. It takes 6-12 months to see results when you’re serious about optimizing your rankings.

If you do this, months 1-3 will involve a lot of foundation work with minimal visible results (which, I promise you, is totally normal). You tend to see keywords move up in months 4-6, with traffic to follow. Things tend to compound in months 7-12 and beyond.

With email marketing, the ultimate metrics you want to optimize for are revenue and sales. And as an intermediate step, clicks are also great. A higher click-to-open rate (CTOR) indicates greater interest in your emails.

But when you’re really early on, and you want to make sure you’re not running into common problems. That is: deliverability issues, a bad email list, or major messaging issues (on the subject line level). For that, you use open rates.

In general, I like to use 40% open rate or greater as a rule of thumb. But remember that email benchmarks vary significantly by industry. If you're under 20%, you have a problem—either your list is cold or your subject lines need some love.

Once you troubleshoot any open rate problems, then you can focus on an appropriate CTOR for your industry, as well as general list growth. It’s worth noting that list growth compounds, so you can do really well if you target 2-5% monthly growth.

A 10,000-person list growing 3% monthly adds 3,600 subscribers annually. If average subscriber value is $50/year, that's $180,000 in potential annual revenue from growth alone.

And on that note, if you’re developing a mailing list, I strongly recommend you set up automated flows in addition to newsletters. They tend to perform dramatically better in terms of winning sales for businesses where automated email flows are appropriate.

If you’re trying to improve your local SEO, then pay close attention to your Google Business Profile in particular. Direction requests convert more than half of the time to actual visits. Phone calls also correlate very strongly with visits in the next 24 hours.

Reviews affect both rankings and conversion as well. Target 2-4 new reviews monthly minimum. You need dozens of reviews to compete in the home services, healthcare, and restaurant industries. You’ll want to keep your average over 4.5 stars if you can, since anything lower will likely cost you customers.

Google rewards businesses getting fresh reviews. Ten reviews from last year matter less than ten reviews from last month. Review recency became a top-five ranking factor in 2025.

Likewise, your ability to rank in the “local pack” will play a big role in whether you get business or bookings. If you rank 1-3 in the map pack, you’re likely to see clicks come from it. Your odds go down quite a bit when you’re below 4. You can use tools like Local Falcon to track this.

In short, if you’re seeing local pack results go up, that’s a positive sign that business is on the way. Likewise, fresh reviews, direction requests, and phone calls are all great signs.

It’s tempting to cut off marketing spending early when the results aren’t coming in. But that can be a mistake as expensive as overspending if you do this too readily.

For example, many businesses give up on SEO at month 3 or 4. This is unfortunately right before the investment starts to pay off, which means quitting at that point is worse than taking no action at all! A more realistic timeline is 6-12 months.

Local SEO tends to be faster, but to a degree that heavily depends on the competition. Quick wins take 1-4 weeks (optimizing the Google Business Profile and adding photos). Medium-term results take 3-6 months (local pack rankings, accumulating reviews). Long-term positioning takes 6-12+ months in competitive markets.

Content marketing needs 6 months for compound effect. Initial content takes time to rank but creates compounding returns after six months where older content drives consistent traffic while new content further boosts related rankings.

Paid advertising starts showing data immediately (impressions, clicks, CTR). But each ad platform takes a while to figure out what to do with your ads, so it’s better to wait at least one week, and preferably 2-4 before judging too heavily. It’s still a good idea to watch for catastrophic problems like 0% CTR, though.

But every single channel requires patience, at least to some degree.

Even if you know very well about the gap between marketing activities and revenue and why it exists, it’s still an anxiety-producing gap. So here’s what you can pay attention to while waiting on revenue:

It’s also important to have a good routine for when to look at these indicators and how to make decisions based on them. To do that, I recommend that you:

Having these kinds of processes in place can help you manage your own anxiety, and that of your stakeholders. It means that you can say things like “we’re in month 3 of a 6-12 month timeline, and the early indicators look like this, this, and this” rather than “it’s too soon to tell.”

Revenue tells you what already happened. Lead indicators tell you what's coming.

It is absolutely correct to focus your attention on revenue and profit. Likewise, it is absolutely correct to have feedback loops that push mature marketing channels toward greater revenue generation and profitability.

But that won’t help you on day 1.

When it’s early, you need to watch things like open rates, keyword positions, and CTR. This will give you early evidence that you’re investing your marketing dollars properly and that your experiments are on track to give you meaningful results…even if the bank account doesn’t say so yet.

Pick a few lead indicators for your business and then track them weekly. Give your channels the time they need to grow and mature. And trust the process when they trend positive.

Remember: being a spendthrift on marketing is self-evidently bad. But so too is failing to invest. The middle is that sweet spot.