If it cannot be measured, it cannot be managed.
That line gets repeated every January because small businesses feel the same pressure at the start of a new year, do more marketing, spend more money, post more content, run more ads, and hope the results show up before the bills do.
The problem is that โmarketingโ is not one thing. It is a pile of channels that behave very differently. One brings leads that never answer. One brings a small number of high-intent customers. One looks quiet for months, then becomes your best source of repeat buyers. If you treat them all the same, you end up funding the loudest channel, not the best one.
A marketing channel scorecard fixes that. It gives you a simple way to rank every channel by cost per lead, conversion rate, and revenue per hour, then double down on what pays you back.
The scorecard works best when you keep the inputs boring. The goal is clarity, not perfect attribution.
- Pick a timeframe, usually the last 30 or 60 days, or the same month last year if your business is seasonal.
- List your channels in one column. Examples: Google Ads, Meta ads, email, SEO, referrals, local events, partnerships, marketplace leads, cold outreach.
- Decide what counts as a lead. For a service business, that might be a booked consult. For ecommerce, it might be an email signup or an add to cart.
Now build the three core metrics.
- Cost per lead: total channel spend divided by leads.
- Conversion rate: customers divided by leads.
- Revenue per hour: revenue from that channel divided by hours you spent on it.
That last one is the piece most small businesses skip, and it is often the one that changes decisions. Paid ads can look expensive until you compare them to the true labor cost of โfreeโ organic marketing. A channel that brings in $2,000 but consumes 12 hours a week is a different animal than a channel that brings in $1,200 and takes one hour a week.
To track hours, you do not need anything fancy. If you already use timesheets, you can treat marketing like any other project. A timesheet template in Google Sheets is enough. Put โchannelโ in the notes field or add a column. The point is to stop pretending time is free.
Once you have the three metrics, the scorecard becomes a ranking exercise. Sort channels by revenue per hour to find what pays you for your time. Sort by cost per lead to find what is efficient at the top of the funnel. Sort by conversion rate to find lead quality. You will usually discover at least one surprise, a channel that looks productive but converts poorly, or a channel that quietly prints money but gets ignored because it feels slow.
If you want to take it one step further, add one more column: gross profit, not revenue. Some channels attract customers who only buy discounted items. Some bring in high return rates. Some generate support-heavy clients. Revenue is helpful, but profit settles arguments faster.
For businesses that already track everything in Sheets, rollups are easy. You can store your raw data in one tab, then summarize it by channel with SUMIFS. If you are doing rollups by channel and date range, the SUMIFS function is the basic workhorse. If you want to build a quick summary table that updates automatically, the QUERY function can do the job with less manual sorting.
There is a trap to avoid here. A scorecard can tempt you to cut any channel that looks weak. That can backfire, especially in January, when demand is often seasonal and consumer behavior shifts. A better use of the scorecard is to separate channels into three buckets.
- Scale now: high revenue per hour, solid conversion, predictable results. Fund these first.
- Fix next: decent leads, weak conversion, or high cost per lead that could improve with better targeting, landing pages, follow-up, or offers.
- Pause or redesign: low revenue per hour and low conversion, especially if you have already tested changes.
Most businesses have at least one channel in the โfix nextโ bucket where small changes produce an outsized return. The lead quality is fine, but the follow-up is slow. The offer is good, but the landing page confuses people. The social posts get attention, but there is no clear path to purchase. This is why pairing the scorecard with a simple workflow matters. A Google Sheets project management template can turn “improve conversion” into a short list of tasks with owners and deadlines, so the scorecard results become action.
The most common reason a channel scorecard fails is messy inputs. Leads get attributed to โInstagramโ because someone followed you there, even though they actually found you through search. A referral gets credited to โword of mouthโ with no record of who referred them. A customer touches three channels and your sheet assigns credit to whichever one you remember first.
You can improve that without buying enterprise software. Add a required question to your intake form or checkout flow asking how they heard about you. Use consistent options that match your channel list.
If you run online campaigns, use UTM parameters so links carry source data. If you do phone-heavy sales, track calls by number or use a dedicated tracking line for key channels. Perfection is not required. Consistency is.
Once the scorecard is running, the January plan becomes clearer. Set a simple cadence: update metrics weekly, review them every two weeks, and make only one or two changes at a time. Small businesses win by compounding good decisions, not by rebuilding the whole marketing system every Monday.
The best outcome is always being able to answer with numbers. You can point to the channels that earn their keep, the channels that need work, and the channels that should stop taking oxygen from the rest of the business.
You can build a scorecard fast with templates you already know how to use. A Google Sheets CRM helps you track leads by source, so you are not guessing later. A Google Sheets sales template helps you connect those leads to closed deals. If you need a clean place to track spending, the Google Sheets expense tracker template works fine for marketing costs too.
If it cannot be measured, it cannot be managed. The scorecard is how you measure it, and January is when that measurement pays off.
