Read the marketing dashboard
Which channels produce paying families, not just enquiries — and what each customer actually costs you.
Marketing Data → Marketing Dashboard turns the daily entries into the four questions worth asking about your marketing.
The funnel, month by month
| Column | What it tells you | |---|---| | Enquiries | how many people asked | | Trials and Trial Booking Rate | how many of them you got into a class | | Sign Ups and Sign Up Rate | how many of those became paying families | | Marketing Cost | what you spent | | Cost Per Enquiry and Cost Per Sign Up | what each was worth | | Sign Up Sales and ROAS | what came back for what you spent |
Read it as three separate problems
The funnel breaks in different places and each break has a different fix. Comparing months, look at *which rate* moved:
- Enquiries down. A reach problem. Spend, or the channel itself.
- Enquiries fine, trial booking rate down. A response problem. How fast, and
how well, does someone answer the enquiry?
- Trials attended fine, sign-up rate down. A conversion problem — the trial
experience, the price, or nobody following up afterwards.
Only the first is fixed by spending more money, and it is the one people reach for first.
Cost per sign-up is the number that matters
Cost per enquiry flatters channels that generate curiosity. Cost per sign-up tells you what a paying family costs, which is the number you can compare against what a family is worth to you over their life at the academy.
Where the numbers come from
Trials, sign-ups and sales are derived from what actually happened. Enquiries and cost are hand-entered.
That means ROAS is only as honest as the cost entry. If cost is missing for a period, the return figures are not calculated rather than estimated — a blank here is the system refusing to make something up.
Do not forget referrals
Referrals rarely show up as marketing spend and are usually the highest-quality channel you have. Check the referral programme's cost against these figures before concluding that paid channels are doing the work.
Related: Record the day's enquiries and spend · Set up your referral cycle · How revenue is counted.