An advertising report shows leads, but the business owner wants to know which became customers and how much it cost to acquire them. The answer gets lost when sales staff do not retain the source, statuses are used inconsistently and payments exist separately from deals.
You can start with a small tracking structure. It should connect the advertising source, enquiry, deal and payment while preserving the distinctions between them.
Agree on four entities:
One contact can submit several enquiries, and one deal can have several payments. Do not turn every record save or instalment payment into a new customer.
Define separately what “sale” means in the management report: a signed contract, fulfilled order or payment. You can analyse several metrics as long as they are named and counted separately.
An enquiry needs:
For a deal, retain the amount and currency, outcome and important dates. For a payment, retain its identifier, date, amount, currency and link to the deal; record refunds separately.
Do not fill an unknown source with a random value. Record “unknown” and investigate the cause. Keep the source reported by the customer separate from the technically recorded source: they may describe different stages of discovering the company.
Businesses often need two different answers: where someone first heard about the company and which visit led to the current enquiry. Use separate fields if you retain both.
Do not overwrite every contact’s history with the latest visit. Agree on which source belongs to an enquiry, how repeat requests are handled and what to do when tags are missing.
This is a chosen internal tracking rule, not proof that one channel alone caused the sale. A recommendation, search and advertising can all participate in one deal.
To start, states such as new enquiry, in progress, qualified, proposal sent, won or closed without a sale are sufficient. Adapt the exact names to your process.
Specify a condition for each transition. For example, qualification is confirmed by fit with the requirement, market and project scope. Sending a proposal does not mean winning the deal.
Assign a team member to check new enquiries and set a response deadline. Automatically creating a CRM record is pointless if nobody sees it or continues the work.
First establish reliable records within the business. Then decide which confirmed stages to send to platforms for measurement and available optimisation.
Google Ads supports offline conversion imports; one option uses the retained Google click identifier, GCLID. Requirements depend on the integration method, so campaign names alone are insufficient for every workflow. Official offline conversion guidance, the GCLID option.
For Meta, the technical structure is covered separately in our article on sending qualified leads and sales from the CRM. Sending data to a platform does not guarantee that every sale will be matched or immediately used by the campaign.
Send only permitted information. Having data in the CRM does not itself establish permission to send it to every connected service.
A customer follows an advertising link and submits a website development enquiry. The system creates enquiry ID 104 and retains the available source. A sales representative confirms fit with the service and links the enquiry to a deal.
After the contract is agreed, the customer makes two payments. The records retain one enquiry, one deal and two payments. If this is the customer’s first order, they count once in the new customer metric.
Where a qualification event must be sent, saving the record again must not recreate the same fact. For the website and GA4, use our event plan from enquiry to qualification.
For each source, compare spending, unique enquiries, qualified requests, new customers and the agreed monetary metric. Also show the share of records without a source and the reasons for losing leads.
For a long sales cycle, compare enquiry cohorts with equal observation periods. This month’s spending and payments on older deals cannot automatically be treated as results of the same cohort.
Calculate acquisition cost using a predefined set of expenses. We explain metric differences in our article on ROAS, CPL and customer acquisition cost.
As part of market analysis and marketing strategy, you can agree on metrics and channel evaluation logic. Assess technical CRM setup, event transmission and error handling separately, based on the specific systems and integration scope.