It’s easy to confuse activity with results. You post on LinkedIn every day, so it must be working. You spend hours on Instagram, so it must be worth it. Sometimes it is. Often, when you actually count the enquiries and clients against the hours, it isn’t — and the channel that’s quietly winning you the most work is the one you’ve been treating as an afterthought.
This matters more for freelancers than it does for a business with a marketing budget and someone dedicated to spending it. Your time is the budget. Getting this wrong doesn’t just waste money, it wastes hours you could have spent on billable work or on the channel that’s actually converting.
Three numbers, per channel, over the last 6–12 months:
That last one is the number most freelancers don’t actually know — and it’s the one that changes the whole picture. A channel that wins you three clients a year looks great until you realise it’s eating eight hours a month to do it.
Work out which marketing channel is actually earning its keep, versus the one that just feels productive because it's the one you enjoy doing. Roughly, over the last 6-12 months.
Enquiries, clients actually won from that channel, and roughly how many hours a month you spend on it.
The tracker ranks your channels by clients won per hour invested — not by enquiries, and not by how much you enjoy doing them. It’s measuring efficiency: how well each channel turns your time into actual paid work. For most freelancers, hours are the real cost of marketing, not ad spend, so this is the number that actually matters.
Alongside the ranking you’ll see each channel’s conversion rate — clients won as a percentage of enquiries — which tells you a different thing: not how efficient a channel is with your time, but how good you are at closing the enquiries it brings you.
If one channel is eating real hours with nothing to show for it, the tracker will flag it directly. That’s worth a proper look before you keep pouring time into it out of habit.
Here’s the thing this tool exposes fast: most freelancers don’t actually know how many hours a month they spend on each channel. I didn’t either, until I checked.
“I once sat at my laptop for an entire day and did 15 minutes of billable work. I’m not proud of it. But it’s true.
By the end of the day I thought “I’ve been sat here all day, I must have done loads!” I opened Toggl. Fifteen minutes. The rest had disappeared into a black hole of pointless procrastination.
Your perception of where your time goes can often be very different from reality.
I use Toggl to track my time. It’s free and probably one of the most useful things I do.
Try tracking everything for one week — billable and non-billable work. The results are usually a wake-up call.”
Do that for a week, or better, a month, and the “hours per month” figures in the tracker above stop being guesses and start being real. That’s when the ranking actually means something.
This tool looks at the last 6–12 months. Some channels don’t play by that timeline — referrals in particular tend to compound slowly. A client you did great work for eighteen months ago might refer you someone next month, and that won’t show up anywhere in this tracker’s numbers today. Don’t read a quiet channel as a dead one without asking whether it’s actually just a slow one.
It also can’t tell you why a channel isn’t converting — whether that’s the channel itself, your positioning on it, or your follow-up. Low numbers are a prompt to look closer, not a verdict.
Worth comparing notes with other freelancers doing similar work near you — the NEFN freelance directory is a reasonable place to start.
Track three things per channel over the last few months: enquiries, clients actually won, and hours spent. Divide clients won by hours spent and you’ll see which channel is genuinely earning its keep, rather than which one just feels busiest.
Jade uses Toggl — it’s free, and tracking a week of billable and non-billable work is usually enough to show you where your time actually goes, which is often very different from where you think it goes.
Most use a simple time-tracking app rather than guesswork — start a timer when you begin a task, stop it when you finish, and let a week or two of data build up before drawing conclusions. Trying to estimate hours from memory is usually where the inaccuracy creeps in.
Not automatically. Some channels, especially referrals, pay off slowly and won’t look efficient in a short window even when they’re worth keeping. But a channel that’s eating several hours a month with zero clients won is worth a hard, honest look — that’s exactly what the tracker above is built to flag.
Working out where your marketing hours actually pay off is one thing. Having other freelancers to compare notes with is another. Become a NEFN member to connect with freelancers across the North East, or browse the freelance directory to see who’s already doing what you do. If you haven’t worked out your day rate yet, the freelance rate calculator is a good place to start.
Jade Gillham is a freelance PPC & LinkedIn Ads consultant with 9+ years’ experience, 7 of them running her own freelance practice, and the founder of the North East Freelance Network.
