"Is our marketing working?" is the hardest question most teams answer badly. The good news: you don't need an expensive analytics stack to get a clear answer. You need tracked links and a simple system to connect a click to a result. Here's how.
What marketing ROI really means
ROI = (value generated − cost) ÷ cost. To calculate it you need two numbers per channel: what you spent, and what it returned. Link tracking is how you reliably attribute the "returned" side to the right channel.
Step 1 — Give every channel a tracked link
List every place your campaign appears — email, Instagram, ads, a flyer — and give each its own tracked, tagged link. Use UTM parameters so each channel is distinct in your reports, then shorten them so they're shareable.
Step 2 — Define the result you care about
A click isn't ROI — a signup, sale or booking is. Decide your conversion event and make sure it's measurable (a thank-you page, a purchase, a form submit).
Step 3 — Connect clicks to conversions
Two common approaches:
- UTM + analytics: your website analytics attributes conversions to the UTM source/medium/campaign on the link that brought the visitor.
- Link-level analytics: lynkily's analytics show clicks and scans per link by device and location, so you can see which link and channel drove the traffic.
Together they connect "this channel got X clicks" to "and Y of them converted."
Step 4 — Do the math per channel
For each channel: (conversions × value per conversion) − spend, divided by spend. Now you can rank channels by ROI instead of gut feel.
Step 5 — Reallocate and repeat
Cut or fix the channels with poor ROI, shift budget to the winners, and re-run. Because lynkily links are editable, you can even re-point a printed QR to a better landing page mid-campaign.
A note on offline ROI
QR codes make print measurable too — a scan is a tracked click. So a flyer or package can be included in the same ROI analysis as your digital channels. See how to track a marketing campaign.
Keep it affordable
You don't need enterprise tooling for this. lynkily bundles short links, UTMs, QR codes and analytics from $5/month — enough to measure ROI across every channel without the big-tool bill. Compare on the pricing page.
