If any paradigm shift has dominated marketing thought over the past decade, it is this: If a tactic can’t be measured, it can’t be trusted. It is this sort of thinking that has driven marketers, dealerships and otherwise, to shift their spending away from hard-to-measure mass market tactics like radio and TV and towards more measurable strategies like direct mail and electronic marketing.

But with all this measuring going on, the next question becomes this: What do you measure? What is the key metric that you look at to determine how your marketing is performing?

Do you simply measure leads generated? Or do you only count those leads that are successfully converted into sales? Perhaps you calculate how much each lead costs? Or do you go even deeper… examining how much profit each lead generated?

Use the comments section to tell us what your key marketing metric is.