Measuring marketing when the sale takes six months

Picture a business that sells packaging machinery, where a sale takes about six months from first enquiry to signed order. In January it ups its Google Ads spend and refreshes the website. In February the owner asks if it's working, and the honest answer is that nobody can know yet. January's enquiries won't turn into orders until around July.

That's the problem with measuring marketing on a long sales cycle. Marketing gets reported monthly and revenue turns up months later. Judge January's marketing on January's sales and you're really judging last year's, so you make decisions on the wrong evidence. Wait until July and you've gone six months without knowing.

There's a workable middle path, and it's nothing exotic.

Record the source when the enquiry arrives

Everything else hangs off this. When someone enquires, you need to know where they came from: which search, which ad, which campaign, or that they rang after seeing your stand at a trade show. It has to be captured at the moment of the enquiry and stored against the person in your CRM, because six months later nobody will remember.

For website forms it's mostly technical, since the source can be read from the link they arrived on and saved with the form. Phone calls are harder and usually need tracked numbers that change depending on how the person found you. There's more on why calls go uncounted in this piece on tracking. For people you met face to face, someone has to record the source by hand, so it needs to be a required step and not a nice idea.

Measure the steps along the way

On a long cycle, stop waiting for the last step and measure the ones before it. A sale moves through stages, like enquiry, qualified, quoted, negotiating and won. Each one happens sooner than the next, and each one can be counted by source.

So in February you can't say how much revenue January's marketing made. You can say how many enquiries it produced, how many sales agreed were real, how many have been quoted and what those quotes are worth. That's real evidence. A campaign that brought thirty enquiries and two quotes is doing something very different from one that brought ten enquiries and six quotes, and you can see that within weeks.

Over time you'll learn your ratios. If about a third of your quotes become orders, quote value by source becomes a decent early read on the revenue each source will eventually bring in.

Judge each month by what it became

The other habit I'd build is grouping enquiries by the month they arrived. Take every enquiry from January, whatever the source, and follow that group over time. How many were quoted by March? How many were won by July, and for how much?

That stops the long cycle blurring everything together. You end up with a clear picture of what January's spend produced, even though it took six months to show, and you can compare it fairly with February and March.

Tell your ads what a good result looks like

Google Ads judges your campaigns on whatever you tell it counts as a result. If that's a form fill, it learns to find people who fill in forms, students and price shoppers included. You're far better off telling it which enquiries turned into quotes or sales.

Google Ads can import those outcomes from your CRM (Google calls it offline conversion import), but there's a time limit. Google's own help pages say the gap from click to result has to be under 90 days, or 14 days for some kinds of connection. A six-month sale won't fit.

The fix is to send an earlier stage instead. "Qualified" or "quoted" often happens within weeks, well inside the window, and it's a much better signal than a form fill. The ads then learn from the enquiries your sales team actually cared about.

Set expectations up front

None of this makes the cycle any shorter. What it does is swap the monthly argument about whether marketing's working for evidence that turns up in stages. Agree at the start which early measures you'll judge it on for the first few months and when you'd expect to see revenue. Then hold everyone to that, including whoever runs your marketing.

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