Marketing Channel ROI Tracker

That line is a hundred years old and it is still true in most small businesses — not because the answer is unknowable, but because nobody does the arithmetic.

Here is the arithmetic.

Step one: what is a lead actually worth to you?

Most owners have never calculated this. They assume they close about half their leads. Run the real funnel — 55% of leads are qualified, 60% of those take a meeting, 35% of those close — and the true lead-to-customer rate is 11.6%.

Multiply by what a customer is worth over their lifetime and one raw lead is worth $272 in gross profit. But if you want marketing to cost no more than 8% of revenue, the most you can actually pay for a lead is $51.89.

That is the number. Once you have it, every lead-gen pitch, every ad platform, every trade show booth becomes a one-second decision.

Step two: grade every channel against it.

Log six numbers per channel per month — spend, leads, qualified leads, appointments, sales, revenue. The workbook calculates cost per lead, cost per sale, lead-to-sale rate, ROAS, gross profit, and ROI, and then gives each channel a plain verdict:

• Scale this one
• Keep, but do not grow it
• Cheap leads that do not close
• Not enough data yet
• Far above what a lead is worth

Beside it, a color-graded Status column — HEALTHY, WATCH, ALERT — so you can see the shape of the whole budget without reading a word.

Step three: read the dashboard.

One page, portrait, printable. Four tiles across the top — what you spent, what it earned after paying for itself, your blended return, and how much is sitting in channels that lose money. Under them, ten measures graded green, amber or red against thresholds taken from your Setup tab, not from someone else's benchmark: marketing as a share of revenue, profit per dollar spent, blended ROAS, cost per sale against your ceiling, cost per lead against what a lead is worth, your close rate against your own funnel. Then two charts. In the sample, six of nine measures come back clear and the overall verdict is ALERT — because 17.7% of the budget is funding a channel that loses money.

Step four: move the money.

The Scorecard ranks every channel by profit after spend, names your best and worst, and totals up exactly how much money is sitting in channels that lose it. In the example loaded in the file, that number is $1,800 — sitting in a print ad producing leads at $94 against a $52 ceiling.

It also tells you when not to buy more leads. The Lead Value tab shows what a five-point improvement in your close rate is worth: nearly $3,900 more profit per hundred leads, usually for free. Fixing the funnel beats widening it, and this is the only tracker on the shelf that puts a dollar figure on that.

One honest warning, up front

This only works if you ask every new customer how they found you and write it down. No spreadsheet can recover attribution you never captured. Put the question on your intake form this week and the tracker starts paying off within a month.

Built for

Contractors and home services · agencies and consultancies · clinics and practices · local retail and restaurants · anyone running Google Ads, Facebook, print, radio, or trade shows and wondering which of them is actually working.

What you get

One .xlsx file, seven tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription.

Two months of realistic sample data are already loaded across eight channels — search, social, referral, email, signage, a neighbourhood app, a trade show booth and local print — so you can see every color of the grading before you type over it.