I have seen a campaign produce nine hundred enquiries and thirty site visits.
I have seen another produce three hundred enquiries and ninety site visits.
The second campaign was three times better and looked half as good in every report anyone was reading.
Why is the enquiry count so misleading?
Because it is the easiest number in the funnel to manufacture.
Loosen the form. Promise a price list. Run a giveaway. Advertise to a wider audience with a softer message. Every one of those pushes the enquiry count up and the cost per enquiry down, and not one of them produces a person willing to spend a Sunday driving to a site.
Which, in this market, is the real test of intent. Nobody visits a project out of idle curiosity. The visit costs them half a day.
So the number that is easiest to move is also the one furthest from a sale, and it is the one on the front page of the report.
What should the report actually show?
Four stages, with the drop between each.
Enquiry. Somebody submitted a form.
Contact. Somebody actually spoke to them. Not attempted, spoke.
Site visit. They turned up.
Booking. They committed.
Once you can see all four, the weak link is usually obvious within a minute. And it is rarely the ad.
In most projects I have audited, the biggest fall is between contact and site visit. That is a sales conversation problem wearing a marketing costume, and no amount of media spend will fix it.
Is a low enquiry count ever good news?
Often, and this is the hardest thing to explain to a client.
If you put the price bracket and the location in the advertising, far fewer people enquire. The ones who do already know roughly what they are looking at. Your cost per enquiry goes up, sometimes sharply, and your cost per site visit comes down.
The report looks worse. The business does better.
I have had this conversation many times and it goes the same way. Everyone agrees in the meeting that site visits are what matter. Then the enquiry count drops for two weeks and the agreement quietly evaporates.
Hold for a month. Judge it on visits.
How do I connect the ad account to the visit?
This is the part people skip, and it is easier than it sounds.
The enquiry has to carry its source into the CRM. Which campaign, which ad, which creative. If your form posts into a spreadsheet or an inbox with none of that attached, you can never answer the only question that matters, which is which advertising produced people who actually turned up.
Then the site visit has to be logged against the same record. Not on paper at the site office, not in a separate register. The same record.
That is the entire technical requirement. Source in, outcome logged against it. Everything after that is reporting.
What about the leads sales says are rubbish?
Take it seriously, and check it before acting on it.
Sales calling leads rubbish is sometimes true and sometimes a description of leads that were called eighteen hours late. Those two look identical from the sales floor and they need opposite fixes.
The way to tell them apart is time to first contact. If the median is under an hour and the leads still do not convert, your targeting or your offer is wrong. If the median is nine hours, fix that before touching the ad account, because you cannot judge lead quality through a delay.
Does this apply outside real estate?
The principle does. The specific metric does not.
Every business has one action that separates browsers from buyers, and it is almost never the enquiry. A demo booked. A quote accepted. A sample requested. Somebody putting a real cost on themselves, whether that is time, money or effort.
Find yours, measure it, and report on that. The enquiry count is what the platform hands you, not what your business runs on.
So what do I do on Monday?
Ask for one report: enquiries, contacts, site visits and bookings, for last month, split by campaign.
If nobody can produce it, that is your answer about what is currently being managed. Building it is about a week of work, and it will change more decisions than anything else you do this quarter.
We build the four stage report before spending anything on media, so the question of what is working has an actual answer. Tell us what you are working on.
