When’s the best time of year to push hard on marketing?

Bottomline cross-references your seasonal revenue patterns with ad performance data to show you which months deliver the best return on marketing spend.

When should I pull back and save the budget?

Your monthly report flags periods where cost per acquisition spikes and conversion rates drop, so you know when to conserve instead of spend.

Which channel has the best ROI?

Bottomline tracks spend and revenue by channel using verified data from your ad platforms and accounting software, not self-reported platform metrics.

Where are my customers actually coming from?

By matching your CRM contacts with ad platform data and payment records, Bottomline shows you the real source of your paying customers.

What am I spending on advertising?

Bottomline pulls your total ad spend across all platforms and compares it to what your accounting software shows, so nothing slips through.

Is my marketing reaching the right people?

You're spending money on ads, emails, and content. But are the people who actually see your marketing the same people who would ever buy from you? Here's how to find out.

7 min read

The short answer

Are you reaching the right people?Compare who your ads are targeting against who actually becomes a paying customer. If those two groups don't overlap, you're burning budget on the wrong audience.

The gap between impressions and paying customers

Your ad platform says you reached 45,000 people last month. Your CRM says you got 28 new leads. Your accounting software says 4 of them paid. That's a conversion rate of 0.009% from impression to customer.

The question isn't whether marketing “works.” It's whether your marketing dollars are landing in front of people who look like your actual buyers. If your best customers are commercial property managers in the Southeast and your Facebook ads are reaching homeowners in the Midwest, the math will never work no matter how good the creative is.

Most business owners never connect these dots because the data lives in three different systems: your ad platform, your CRM, and your books. Each one tells a different piece of the story. None of them tells the whole thing.

Three signals that reveal targeting accuracy

You need to answer three sub-questions:

Who is clicking? Look at the demographics and locations of the people engaging with your ads. Do they match your ideal customer profile?
Who is converting? Of the leads that come in, which ones actually become customers? What do they have in common?
What did each customer cost? Divide your total ad spend by the number of customers acquired. Then compare that cost to the revenue each customer generates.

How to audit your marketing targeting manually

This requires pulling data from your ad platform, your CRM, and your accounting software. Here's the process:

1
Export your ad platform audience data
In Google Ads, go to Audiences under the Campaigns tab. In Facebook Ads Manager, go to Ad Set level and check Audience details. Export the demographics, locations, and interests of who is seeing and clicking your ads.
2
Pull your CRM lead list for the same period
In your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.), filter contacts created this month. Export the list with source, location, industry, and deal status. This tells you who actually came in the door.
3
Match leads to paying customers in your books
In QuickBooks, go to Reports and search for Sales by Customer Summary. In Xero, go to Accounting → Reports and export invoices by customer. Cross-reference this with your CRM list to see which leads actually paid.
4
Calculate cost per acquisition by channel
Take your total ad spend from each platform (check your accounting software under advertising expenses to verify) and divide by the number of customers acquired from that channel. If Google Ads cost $4,200 and produced 3 customers, your CPA is $1,400 per customer.
5
Compare CPA to customer lifetime value
If it costs you $1,400 to acquire a customer who generates $800 in revenue, your targeting is off. You're paying to reach people who don't spend enough to justify the cost.

Total time: 1 to 2 hours the first time. You need data from three different systems and a spreadsheet to tie it all together.

How often you should check targeting alignment

Monthly at minimum. Ad platform algorithms shift your audience over time as they “optimize.” What started as a tightly targeted campaign can drift into broad, low-intent audiences within weeks. If you only check quarterly, you could burn an entire quarter's budget before catching it.

Or see your targeting accuracy automatically

Bottomline connects to your ad platforms, CRM, and accounting software. Every month, it matches who your ads reached against who actually became a paying customer and calculates your real cost per acquisition by channel.

Marketing targeting accuracy

Google Ads3 customers$1,400 CPA

Facebook Ads7 customers$620 CPA

Email campaigns12 customers$85 CPA

From a real Bottomline report. CPA is calculated from verified accounting data, not platform self-reporting.

Instead of spending 2 hours pulling data from three systems, you get a single view that shows which channels are putting your message in front of the right people and which ones are wasting your money.