How to know if your marketing is actually working

Sofia opened a pilates studio in Cascais six months ago. She spends €400 a month across Google Ads, Meta Ads and Instagram content. Every month she pays, every month people show up, but every month she’s left with the same question: is it worth it?

It’s the most common question among founders. And the hardest to answer — not because there’s no data, but because there’s too much of it, scattered across different platforms, in different languages.

This is the path Sofia took to find an answer. What she discovered might help you too.

Month 1 — the illusion of isolated numbers

In the early weeks, Sofia looked at scattered numbers. “This post got 50 likes” or “that ad got 1,200 clicks.” She felt good on good days and anxious on bad ones, but could never say whether the marketing, as a whole, was working.

The problem was she was tracking vanity metrics — numbers that look important but don’t connect to anything concrete. Likes don’t pay the studio rent. Clicks don’t either.

Month 2 — the attempt to connect the dots

After a few weeks, she realised she needed to cross-reference her data. She started building a spreadsheet pulling numbers from Google Analytics, Meta Business Suite, Instagram Insights and the Google Ads dashboard.

After two Mondays she gave up. It took 90 minutes to update the sheet, each platform described things slightly differently, and by the time she had everything together she couldn’t draw conclusions. The numbers existed, but they didn’t talk to each other.

Having data is not the same as having answers. And nobody pays the rent with data they can’t read.

Month 3 — the right question

Sofia realised she’d been asking the wrong question. “Is my marketing working?” is too vague to have an answer.

She replaced it with three concrete questions:

1. Are more people coming to the studio than three months ago?
2. Is each new student costing more or less to acquire?
3. Do the students who come through marketing stay, or disappear after two classes?

With these three questions, she built a simple mental dashboard — three numbers she reviews every Monday in 10 minutes:

• New students per month (from the booking software): up from 8 to 17 in three months ✅
• Cost per new student (total marketing spend ÷ new students): down from €50 to €23 ✅
• 4-week retention (how many new students are still here a month later): holding at 70% ✅

All three up or stable? Marketing is working. One or more dropping? Time to investigate.

What Sofia couldn’t solve on her own

With this mental dashboard, Sofia had clarity — but it still took too much time to get there every week. Opening four platforms, copying values, comparing with the previous week, figuring out what changed in traffic, social, paid campaigns.

Eventually, she found us. We built Raveki for exactly this problem: cross the signals from your connected platforms, translate them into plain language, and deliver a daily report on what actually changed — without opening a single dashboard.

Sofia’s mental dashboard is still hers. The difference is that instead of taking 40 minutes to build, it shows up ready.

What you take away

Three questions to decide if your marketing is working:

1. Are more customers coming now than three months ago?
2. Is each new customer costing more or less?
3. Do new customers stay, or disappear?

Answer these three honestly, every week. You don’t need more. You need consistency.

And if all three answers are good, your marketing is working — even if the Instagram likes say otherwise.