thunder-and-flash-marketing

The Playbook on How to Measure If Your Marketing Is Working

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:34:08 GMT

The blueprints to measuring your marketing properly

Most businesses don't lack marketing activity, they lack marketing clarity. They lack the insight to confidently say "yes this is working" or "no, we need to pivot".

It's all too common that well thought out campaigns will be running, content will be going live, and media budgets will be spent.

However, when someone in leadership asks: “Tell me how this actually working?” or "show me where this meets our business goals", it's often a struggle to answer those questions confidently.

If you cannot confidently connect marketing performance to commercial outcomes, then you are not measuring effectiveness. You are observing noise.

This article is the Thunder & Flash playbook for measuring whether your marketing is truly working. It combines KPI planning, GA4 configuration, structured tracking, and clear reporting into one joined up ecosystem that provides confidence in data, noise-free data capture, objective lead data organisation, and accessible visualisation of data.

Step 1: Define What 'Working' Actually Means

The first thing that most folks do is to go into their Google Analytics dash aimlessly and try and dig out data retrospectively. This is your sign to stop, take a step back, and think about what your business wants to achieve.

The reality is that marketing cannot be measured in isolation from business intent.

Ask yourself:

What commercial objective are we trying to influence?
Over what time period?
How will we know if we are closer to it or not?

Some examples of the types of things that a business might be working towards

If the business objective is:

Increase profitability by 20 percent
Open a new location
Launch a new product
Generate 40 qualified leads per month

Then marketing that is 'working' must be defined against those outcomes.

It's not traffic, impressions, or engagement alone. All of those are surface level metrics that don't tell a story.

Build KPI Logic From the Objective

For a lead generation based business, your core marketing KPIs might be something along the lines of:

Qualified leads per month
Website conversion rate
Cost per lead
Lead to sale conversion rate

For a brand growth objective (where perhaps a competitor has stepped into the market):

Branded search growth in Google Search Console
Direct traffic trend
Share of search
Assisted conversions

If your KPIs do not map directly to commercial outcomes, your measurement framework is flawed and does not tell the story that is both accurate and in the language that peers and colleagues need to understand it's impact.

This is the strategic layer so many businesses skip when delivering their marketing.

Once you know what metrics you need to see, it's integral to check whether your data is trustworthy. This step is where a high proportion of marketing performance issues originate, and it often goes unnoticed.

A typical and basic measurement setup should include:

Correctly configured GA4 account and property
A Google Tag Manager container with custom events and tags in place that work and are measurable
Verified Google Search Console
Proper conversion event definitions (sometimes configured with Google Tag Manager)
Ecommerce tracking if relevant (including correct ecommerce data-layer events, in line with Google Analytics best practice)
Correct consent mode signals

Common problems we uncover during audits:

Conversions not configured to valuable actions
Partial data capture ecosystems (GA4 but no Google Search Console)
Ads bidding towards non-valuable key events
Ecommerce revenue misreporting or missing
Google Tag Manager embedding issues

All of these are specific and isolated issues, but even one of these can mean that your tracking ecosystem is failing. If your ecosystem is unstable, your conclusions will be unstable.

Ultimately, you cannot optimise what you cannot measure accurately.

Step 2: Audit Your Data Infrastructure

Step 3: Create a Structured Tracking Plan

A tracking plan is the technical blueprint behind your measurement ecosystem, and the instruction manual for how your dashboards report correctly on the metrics that show marketing performance against your business objectives.

A tracking plan is designed to remove ambiguity, and define:

What counts as a primary conversion
What counts as supporting engagement
What events need to be tracked and be present in GA4
How events are triggered via GTM
How they appear inside GA4 and where
How they align to KPIs

For example, a primary conversion (which is the closest action a user can take on a website to a purchase) might be:

Contact form submission
Book a consultation
Completed purchase

A secondary engagement (which is a metric that helps to tell the story, but isn't the end) might be:

Click to call
Brochure download
Newsletter sign up

These clear cut metrics are the backbone of what a tracking plan is - the pieces of data that come together to say what actions users took, and if they didn't what did they do instead. These are just a few risks of NOT having a well thought out tracking plan in place:

Teams define performance differently
Reports contradict each other from one source to the next
Optimisation decisions become opinion based and not data driven

When you hav a tracking plan, you have one single source of truth, and everyone operates from the same performance framework.

Step 4: Build a Dashboard That Reflects Strategy

Raw data present in multiple platforms is not clarity, even when configured correctly. It is fragmentation, and admin heavy for the reader. While Google (and other providers) have wonderful platforms, they are designed around specific purposes (reading website traffic, measuring ad performance, gathering data on search engine visibility etc).

For example: GA4 tells one chapter of the story, Google Ads tells another, and Search Console tells a third.

Most businesses are forced to manually stitch these together, flicking between tabs, trying to remember where they were last, and remembering what they've seen.

There are many tools out there that can help to pool data sources, but Google's very own Looker Studio can solve this by things like:

Centralising data sources into one visualisation
Aligning and presenting reporting to agreed KPIs
Structuring data by funnel stage
Showing trends over time
Comparing performance against targets
Combining data sources to output single, clearer metrics

A strong dashboard should answer instantly:

Are leads increasing?
Is cost per acquisition stable or rising?
Is brand demand growing?
Which channels contribute most to revenue?

If a reporting dashboard shows everything, it shows a wall of noise that is just as chaotic as the original data source. A good reporting dashboard should reflect strategic priorities, not platform metrics.

This is where many businesses fall back into vanity metrics, and despite good intentions end up using the same pieces of data that they were using before... because they're familiar, because stakeholders respond to these.

"Traffic is up 40 percent", or "engagement is up 25 percent". That's interesting, but what does it mean that has value?

The questions that will counter are:

Did qualified leads increase?
Did revenue increase?
Did cost per acquisition improve?
Did branded search grow?

These types of questions are driven by the objectives of the business, and as such marketing is only working when it moves commercial indicators that help to answer these.

This is a necessary discipline that turns marketing from a cost centre into a performance engine.

Step 5: Analyse Performance Through a Commercial Lens

Presented in this article, the process looks logical and straightforward with a bit of thought. However, we want to be clear to you that in reality, it requires:

Strategic KPI mapping
Technical GA4 and GTM configuration
Clean event architecture
Accurate attribution understanding
Funnel logic
Dashboard design that reflects commercial priorities
A deep understanding of the platforms and their setup
An ongoing awareness of platform evolution

When doing this DIY, many businesses overcomplicate reporting (which is easily done when attempting to think of metrics that mean something), or under-configure tracking when the realisation hits that this is a more technical task than originally anticipated.

It's all to easy for measurement to become inconsistent, subjective, and occasionally misleading.

Poor measurement can lead to expensive and damaging decisions.

Why This Playbook Is Hard to Execute Without Expertise

At Thunder & Flash, we treat data and tracking as core infrastructure, not an add on. We rarely build projects for our clients without this in place first, and at the very least we typically write in an audit to safeguard our clients and ourselves from poor or misleading data.

Our framework typically includes:

Objective and KPI mapping workshop
Full analytics and tracking audit
GA4, GTM & GSC configuration
Structured tracking plan documentation
Custom Looker Studio dashboard build
Ongoing interpretation and optimisation

What we 're delivering through this exercise isn't just visibility, it's a whole new confidence and peace of mind that what is being looked at and used to make big decisions, it reliable and honest.

With this, you get to know:

What is driving profitable growth
What is underperforming
Where to invest more
Where to pull back

Put quite simply, that is how you measure whether marketing is working... or not!

The Thunder & Flash Measurement Framework

Marketing doesn't move in straight lines

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:02:45 GMT

Marketing isn't straight forward (or straightforward)

As humans, we naturally want things to be linear, predictable, and with a clear line of sight. We also want things to be accessible and as easy as possible. These are generalisations, but it is in our nature. Oddly, there is a contradiction there, because in seeking a straight road to get what we want or need, we will take sharp turns in order to make our journey shorter, creating a winding route to get to our desires.

This is relevant to marketing because from a business perspective, which is built by humans, predictability and accurate forecasting help to keep the lights on. A business also seeks straight roads. However, when people buy products and services, the routes to buying are not straight, and prospects can enter the buying journey at any point, over any period of time.

Marketing would be much easier if customers behaved like a pipeline.

They do not.

The funnel was never meant to be a conveyor belt

We have all seen the traditional marketing funnel. Awareness at the top. Consideration in the middle. Intent and purchase at the bottom. Then loyalty and advocacy beyond the transaction.

It is a helpful model, sure. It gives structure to how people think.

But what the funnel actually represents is various stages of thought, not a strict process that people follow step by step. It was never meant to be a conveyor belt.

In reality, people:

Discover a brand after they have already decided to buy
Research casually for months without intention
Make impulsive purchases with almost no visible journey
Disappear for long periods of time
Reappear at the point of intent without warning

The stages of the funnel do indeed exist. The order does not.

Buying behaviour is volatile

Let's consider a few examples to paint the picture here...

A homeowner thinking about a kitchen renovation might browse ideas on social media for a year before ever contacting a supplier. They're on P interest making boards for styles they like. They're feeding Insta's algorithm with their love for chic kitchen architecture. That is awareness and consideration happening slowly, without urgency.

A trade buyer, on the other hand, might know exactly what product they need, search for it once, compare two prices, and purchase within minutes. They enter at intent and they want what they need immediately.

Someone else might see a piece of content today, forget about it tomorrow, then six months later search for your brand by name.

People jump forward, they loop backwards, they stall, they accelerate, they skip stages entirely.

The journey is messy because people are messy, and marketing exists to connect businesses with people (so it can appear a little like one farmer chasing an entire flock of sheep on the loose!).

If human behaviour is non linear, marketing must be too.

The funnel, and the risk of focusing on just one stage

Where many businesses go wrong is not in understanding the funnel (particularly as it representing stages of thought), but in over prioritising one part of it; typically the lower end because it's the last touchpoint before money is made!

“We just need more leads.”

“We just need more traffic.”

“We just need more sales.”

These are understandable pressures. But each of these statements usually translates into over investing in one stage of the journey. The above are all common needs of business, because they impact the most important thing - to generate income and keep the machine turning.

If you only focus on awareness, you create attention without conversion. You generate interest but have no mechanism to capture it. You become reliant on your brand and proposition being so compelling that someone won't go anywhere else. That's a lovely thought, but it's not reality.

If you only focus on bottom of funnel activity, such as high intent paid search, you rely entirely on existing demand. You compete harder, often on price, inflating advertising costs and reducing margins, and struggle to build future pipeline. We sometimes call this 'advertising debt' (your business succeeding is indebted to your commitment to giving money to Google Ads etc).

If you only focus on retention (which is rare, but admirable), you protect what you have but limit your ability to grow beyond your existing customer base.

Marketing that concentrates on a single stage is not wrong, it is incomplete, and incomplete systems create fragile growth.

Marketing should mirror human behaviour

If we unpack it, marketing is simply people connecting with people. A business is just a group of people offering something of value to another group of people.

If that is true, then marketing should mirror how people actually behave.

Therefore, marketing should:

Be visible when someone is casually exploring
Be helpful when someone is researching
Be compelling when someone is ready to buy
Be supportive after the purchase
Be memorable long after the transaction

This isn't just about 'doing everything'. It is about designing a system that acknowledges the volatility of buying behaviour, and understanding the varying needs and priorities of prospective customers.

A well structured marketing strategy prepares for movement across the funnel. It doesn't panic when someone jumps from awareness to intent. It doesn't rely on one channel to carry the entire commercial burden.

What it does, is to build presence, nurture trust, create memories, and develop infrastructure.

When intent rears it's head, in the moment or after time, a business is ready.

So, what does this means in practice?

In practical terms for a business, this might look like something as simple as:

Using paid search to capture high intent demand, while using content and social media to build future demand
Investing in SEO that supports both research based queries and transactional ones
Running email marketing that nurtures prospects and re engages customers
Measuring performance across the journey, not just last click conversions

Or in many cases, it'll be a combination of these - it all depends on what a business wants to achieve and who it's talking to.

What it does also mean, is setting expectations internally. Marketing is not a switch you turn on at the bottom of the funnel. It is an ecosystem that supports the full spectrum of human decision making.

When it is only funded at the point of crisis, it feels unpredictable. However, w hen it is built as infrastructure and a fluid but interconnected ecosystem, it becomes resilient.

As said at the start of this article, businesses want straight lines because straight lines feel safe. They make forecasting easier and they make reporting cleaner. However, customers do not move in straight lines.

The brands that grow sustainably are not those that force a linear model onto human behaviour. They are the ones that design marketing systems flexible enough to meet people wherever they are.

At Thunder & Flash, this is what responsible marketing looks like, and it's an ethos that we live by in our work.

It starts with business objectives, yes. However, it also respects human behaviour. It acknowledges that buyers can enter at any stage, at any time, and that growth comes from being present across the journey, not just at the point of sale.

If your marketing is only focused on one part of the funnel, you are only meeting your customers some of the time, and marketing that only works some of the time is not a strategy, it is a gamble!

If you want to build a marketing strategy that meets your customers throughout their buying journey, talk to us below:

Designing for the reality, not the theory

A Simple Looker Marketing Report For The People

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:37:10 GMT

Making marketing decisions with no data costs everything

If you have the choice to make marketing decisions with or without data, you'd choose the former every time, right? Of course, but you'd be surprised how few businesses we speak to use data to inform decisions or measure their marketing.

Making decisions on where to spend marketing resources based on a whim costs money and time. It's easy to spend time putting together a Google Ads campaign for an audience because it feels right, but the reality is that you might already rank really well for those search queries organically. That's time and money wasted. Or, you could be spending money every month on Meta Ads with a full suite of ads, but only one of them is generating conversions. Without that knowledge, money is wasted and time isn't optimised.

It's not a lack of desire, it's the cost of time and energy

Making marketing decisions with no data isn't for lack of desire, it's often because it takes time to understand and read data and have the confidence to know what you're looking at is telling you the right story. It's also difficult to even know where to look, whether it be in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Meta Business Manager etc. Above all, it's the time needed to do all of the above; learn, find, interpret.

For example, understanding website traffic behaviour takes years of practice with Google Analytics, knowing where to find key reports, understanding the definition of dimensions and metrics, and using secondary dimensions and filters to drill down to insightful information. Even after this, it's knowing how to interpret data and tell a wider and actionable story. Ross is our data and tracking specialist , with a decade and a half of experience in measuring and interpreting client data in his client's language.

Another example is simply understanding conversion on websites. To accurately understand how many users are submitting contact forms, it requires some configuration in Google Tag Manager (a Google tool, like Google Analytics, that allows you to embed tags and code without having to be a developer) and marking up of key events in Google Analytics. This also requires knowledge and experience to do properly, something that few business leaders have time or energy to do.

There's an answer to simple reporting

At Thunder & Flash Marketing, we get this and it's probably the most common thing we hear when we first speak with clients. At the very least, data is misinterpreted or only partially visible. We don't want to see this, we want everyone to understand the basic data that allows them to understand and interpret their website traffic.

That's why we've made a simple marketing report template that anyone can access, download and configure. Within 30 minutes you'll have what you need to get straightforward reporting on your website, it's performance in Google Search and Google Ads if you have them.

We call this ‘The Website Marketing Report For The People’.

What you'll need to get started:

A computer
Internet access
A Google Account which also has:
Admin access to your Google Analytics

If you need any help with this, give us a call and we'll help for free!

Introducing The Website Marketing Report For The People… and its absolutely free!!

Tracking the right data and insights to make marketing decisions is imperative and potentially costly if done wrong. It takes knowledge and experience to do this accurately. However, we want to give everyone the chance to track the basics of website data with confidence. What's better: we won't charge you a penny for it!

Why are we doing this? We hope that if you ever need support with your marketing, you'll think of us and get in touch. Also, by arming you with knowledge opens doors for us: you get to see the gaps and Thunder & Flash Marketing is a possible solution. Put simply, we do this to start conversations. Either way, we get to give you something useful.

Getting Started

Step 1: Download your new Looker Report template

Click this link: https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/142939f0-9c40-48ea-aa82-e1a72df869f1
Click the three dots top right of the report and hit ‘Make a copy’

Step 2: Plug in your data to the Report

You’ll then be asked to plug in your data (this is where you need to have admin access to your Google Analytics AND be logged into the same Google Account)
Click the drop-down, where you’ll see the available data sources - you’ll need to click ‘Create data source’
From here, select ‘Google Analytics’. If you don’t, search it in the search bar at the top.
This will then open up a window which includes the available Google Analytics accounts and properties you have access to. Select the website account and property you’d like to connect to your new report.
Make sure you select a GA4 property (if you still have an old UA property in your account list)

Step 3: Copy the report

Once you’ve connected your data source, this will bring you back to the copy report window - click ‘Copy Report’

Congratulations! You're now a step closer to simple and straight to the point reporting!

Using Your New Report

Give it a name!

Firstly, you'll want to give your report a name and put your own business name on the front (after all, it's personal to you!)

Right at the top of the window, you'll see its name 'Copy of Thunder & Flash Template Report - The Report For The People'. Change this to whatever you'd like your report to be called.
On the front page, click where it says [INSERT BRAND NAME] and type in your business name.

Tip: Make sure you're in the editing window, and not the view window. You'll know if you're in the view window, because you'll see the following top right, and you'll just need to click 'edit':

Setting the date range

Your new report works in 'real time' - constantly fed by data from your Google Analytics. This also means that you can adjust the date range and manipulate the data in the report.

You can do this top right with the date selector:

The important data at a glance

The report gives you what you need to know with as little hassle as possible. The first section highlights the three most important metrics on your website: traffic (measured in sessions), engagement rate and conversions. This lets you open the report and quickly see how things are going for any given period of time.

It looks like this:

Report sections, leading with a purpose

Each section of the report is broken out by a purpose, explaining why the data in it is insightful and how it can be used.

They look like this:

Guides to make sure you understand the measurement metrics

Next to the section introductions mentioned above, you'll find a key that outlines some of the language and names of the metrics and what they mean.

They look like this:

You're all set! Happy data gathering

With the above instructions, you should be well set up to start gathering data that actually means something to you and that you can use to make your marketing work harder for you.

Again, if you need any help with this, give us a call and we'll help you for free!

If you don't have Google Analytics

You may have looked at this and realised that you don't have Google Analytics, or you're not sure if you do.

At Thunder & Flash Marketing, we're data & tracking specialists , so we are well-equipped to help you get set up with your data and tracking infrastructure. Get in touch with us , and we can chat about your needs.

You might find that this report doesn't quite give you the depth of data you need

This report is designed to give users the very most basic reporting data, but we understand that you may need more than this, or have a more bespoke infrastructure.

That's no problem, you can get in touch with us to discuss a more bespoke data and reporting solution .