Count two things. How many people got in touch, and how many of those became work. Then ask every new customer where they heard about you and write the answer down. At the volumes a local business deals in, that beats any analytics dashboard, because the numbers are too small for a dashboard to be stable.
This is unfashionable advice and we give it constantly. A business getting thirty inquiries a month cannot draw conclusions from a percentage change in a channel report. It can absolutely draw conclusions from twenty seven people saying how they found it.
Why not just read the analytics?
Because attribution at this scale is close to fiction. Somebody sees your van, searches your name a week later, clicks a listing, comes back through a bookmark and calls the number. Analytics will credit that to whatever the last click was, and the van gets nothing.
Analytics is genuinely useful for the questions it is good at: which pages people read, where they leave, whether the phone experience is broken. It is poor at telling a small local business which marketing produced the customer, and reading it as if it can is how businesses cancel the thing that was actually working.
What should I actually count?
| Count | How |
|---|---|
| Contacts this month | Calls plus form submissions plus messages |
| Booked work from those contacts | Your own records, not a dashboard |
| Where each one came from | Ask the customer, write it down verbatim |
| Cost per booked job | Total spend divided by jobs booked |
Four numbers a month, on one page. If it takes longer than five minutes to produce, it will not get produced past March.
How do I ask the question without it being awkward?
Put it in the normal flow of the first conversation. "Before I forget, how did you come across us?" Nobody minds, most people answer, and you get a level of detail no software can produce.
Write the answers verbatim rather than into categories. "Your van was outside my neighbor's house" and "I found you on Google" are different facts and they should not end up in the same bucket. After three months of verbatim answers you will know things about your own business that surprised you.
Cannot tell whether it is working?
Send us your last three monthly reports. We will tell you what they actually say about the business, which is often less than it looks.
Get a free website and marketing auditWhat about the things you cannot count?
Some real effects do not show up as numbers, and pretending otherwise leads businesses to cancel useful work. The main one is arriving at the phone call already convinced. A customer who read three of your pages before calling behaves completely differently from one who found you cold, and that shows up as a higher close rate rather than as traffic.
Ask whoever answers the phone whether callers seem better informed than they used to be. It is a soft signal and it is a real one, and it is often the first evidence that content work is landing, months before it shows in anything you can chart.
How long before I can judge?
Advertising, three to four weeks. Content and search, six months honestly, and a year to judge it properly. Reviews, a season.
The most expensive mistake in this whole area is judging a slow channel on a fast timetable. Search work assessed at week six always looks like a failure, because at week six it is a failure. The businesses that get value from it are the ones that were told the timeline in advance and held their nerve.
What is the one number to start with?
Contacts. If you record nothing else, record how many people got in touch each month, and start this month rather than waiting for a better system.
It is a single figure in a notebook and it is more useful than any tool, because it is the number every other decision hangs off. Once you have six months of it you can see your own season, judge a campaign against the same month last year, and tell whether a quiet week is a problem or a Tuesday in March. Almost every business we work with could have started that record years earlier and almost none of them did, because it looked too simple to bother with.
What about comparing to last year?
The most useful comparison a seasonal business has, and the one most reports ignore in favor of comparing to last month.
Comparing October to September in a business with a real season tells you about the season, not about the marketing. Comparing this October to last October tells you something. Keep a simple record of contacts by month, and after a year you have the only benchmark that is genuinely about your own business rather than about an industry average from somewhere else. Two years of that record is worth more than any dashboard, and it takes about a minute a month to keep.
What we changed about our own reporting
We used to lead with traffic because it was the number that moved most and looked most impressive. A client told us politely that the first two pages of our report were for us rather than for him. He was right, and it was an uncomfortable thing to hear.
Now the first line of every report is contacts. Traffic sits underneath, if at all. It made our reports shorter and less flattering and considerably more useful, and it changed which work we recommended, because it is harder to recommend something that produces traffic and no phone calls when the phone calls are the first thing on the page.
What our reporting covers is part of every plan on the pricing page, how the measurement connects to the work is on the Growth Engine page, and if you want us to look at what you are currently being told, send it over.