What Tracking Can and Cannot Tell You

A plumber gets a call. The caller says she saw his truck on the highway, checked his website that evening, found a review, and then called from her phone. Which of those made her call? Now imagine your tracking has to give one answer.

Whatever the software says, it will pick one. Depending on how it is set up, it will often give the credit to the last thing she touched, and that may be the least important thing she did. Deciding which touch gets the credit is called attribution, and every tool makes its own choice. This is the honest limit of tracking: it records what it can see, and a lot of what moves people cannot be seen.

What tracking does well, and where it goes blind

Tracking is very good at counting. It can tell you how many people clicked, how many filled in a form, and how many landed on a page. That is useful, and I would not run paid advertising without it. If you are not yet doing it, start with How to Track Results.

But it goes blind in some predictable places. People see something on their phone and buy on their computer. They hear about you in one place and search for you by name in another, so it looks like the search did all the work. They visit three times before they enquire. And some people avoid being tracked at all, which is their right.

Then there are phone calls. For many local businesses, especially contractors, the phone is the main way a customer arrives. A click that leads to a call is easy to lose unless you set up call tracking or at least log every call by hand. A lead you cannot see is not a lead you can credit, and if you cannot credit it, you may cut the very campaign that produced it.

The channel no software measures: word of mouth

For a lot of service businesses, referrals are the biggest source of customers, and they are almost invisible to tracking. A neighbour mentions you, the person searches your name, and the dashboard says the customer came from a search. Search gets the credit and the neighbour gets nothing.

This is why I like one very old, very simple habit. Ask every new customer: how did you hear about us? Ask it on the phone, on the intake form or at the first visit, and write the answer down in the same place every time. Give them room to say more than one thing, because often there is more than one.

The answer will be imprecise, and people forget or give the easy answer. But put the software’s answer beside the customer’s own words and you get a much fuller picture. When the two agree, you can be more confident. When they disagree, you have found something worth asking about.

Treat all of this as a set of clues, not a verdict. Are you asking tracking to prove something, or to help you make a better decision? Those are different jobs, and only the second one is realistic.

Handle customer data with care

Everything above means you are collecting information about real people: names, phone numbers, emails, what they clicked and what they said. That is a responsibility. Collect only what you will actually use, tell people plainly what you do with it, keep it in one protected place, and do not share it casually.

Set it up this week

Add the question “How did you hear about us?” to wherever a new customer first appears: the phone script, the booking form or the invoice conversation. Write every answer in one place, with the date. In a month, put those answers next to what your tracking says and look for the differences.

Adding the question takes about 15 minutes. Reading the answers takes a few minutes a week and about an hour a month to compare them with your other numbers. Basic call logging is free. Call tracking software may cost something, so check current prices yourself.