Asking How They Found You

The cheapest research there is

Four words, asked of somebody who is already talking to you, answered honestly in most cases, costing nothing.

It also reaches places no measurement can: the recommendation from a neighbour, the van seen outside a job, the conversation at a counter, the memory of a leaflet from two years ago.

Those channels are frequently the largest source of work for a local business and they are entirely invisible to every analytics tool.

The reason it is undervalued is that it produces a spreadsheet rather than a dashboard, and it requires a person to remember to do it.

Ask late, not first

Timing changes both the answer rate and the quality.

Asked at the start, it interrupts somebody who rang to solve a problem, and it reads as processing rather than listening. The answer tends to be short and unconsidered.

Asked once the enquiry has been established and you are wrapping up, it is a natural aside and people answer at length.

The best moment is usually just after you have said what happens next, when the caller is relaxed because the thing they were worried about has been handled.

Open words beat a list

A dropdown with six options produces six answers, and the most popular is nearly always the one meaning none of these.

An open question produces sentences, and the sentences contain the useful part.

Somebody who says they searched for you after their sister mentioned your name has told you two things, and a list would have recorded one of them or neither.

Write down what they said rather than translating it into a category. Categorising is a job for later, when you have thirty answers and can see what the natural groupings actually are.

Phrasing that works

• How did you come across us?
• Do you mind me asking how you found us?
• Where did you hear about us?
• Have you used us before, or is this the first time?

The fourth is useful because it separates new customers from returning ones without sounding like a survey, and returning customers are a category people routinely forget to count.

The follow-up question

One additional question does more than any refinement of the first.

When somebody says they found you online, ask what they searched for.

Online is a useless answer on its own. The words they typed are enormously useful, because they are what other people are typing too, and they are frequently not the words your site uses.

People remember this surprisingly well, and the answers regularly contain phrasing no keyword tool would have suggested, expressed as a problem rather than as a service.

A worked example

An installation company asked every caller for six months and recorded the answers verbatim, ending with about two hundred lines.

Three findings changed what they did.

Roughly a third mentioned a person by name, meaning referrals were their largest source and nobody had been thanking anybody.

Among those who searched, the same problem-shaped phrase came up repeatedly, and it appeared nowhere on their website, which was organised by product name.

And a directory they paid for annually was mentioned twice in two hundred conversations.

They wrote a page around the phrase people actually used, started a small thank-you for referrals, and cancelled the directory.

The page became their most visited within a year.

The answers are unreliable, and still useful

Worth being honest about, because overclaiming for this method invites it being dismissed.

People misremember. Somebody who saw an advert, forgot it, searched your name a week later and clicked the first result will tell you they found you on a search engine, and they are wrong in a way that flatters search.

Recommendations get compressed: found you online frequently means somebody told me your name and then I looked you up.

The right response is not to abandon the question but to hold the results loosely. It is directionally reliable and precise about nothing, which is exactly the opposite of analytics, and that is why the two together are better than either.

Make it somebody's job

The reason this stops after a fortnight is that it is nobody's responsibility.

It has to be attached to a person and a place: whoever answers the phone, recorded in the same sheet where enquiries are already logged.

If the record lives somewhere separate, it will be filled in for two weeks and abandoned.

Reviewing it monthly, briefly, also matters, because a record nobody reads stops being kept. Ten minutes reading the answers aloud is usually enough to keep it alive, and it is the point at which patterns get noticed.

Ask the ones who did not buy

The version of this question almost nobody asks, and it is the more useful half.

Somebody who enquired, received a quote, and went elsewhere knows something you do not: what the alternative offered, and what tipped it.

The obstacle is that it feels like chasing a lost sale, so it never happens. It reads very differently when the sale is plainly gone and you say so: no longer trying to win the work, just trying to understand what would have made a difference.

Most people answer, several answer at length, and a small number reconsider on the spot, which is a side effect rather than the purpose.

The answers cluster fast. Three or four reasons account for nearly everything, and they are usually specific and fixable: a price presented without explanation, a response that took too long, or something a competitor offered that you also do and never mentioned.

Ten of these conversations tell you more about why enquiries fail than a year of watching where people leave the site.

The counter-case

There are situations where this is the wrong instinct.

In a distressed or urgent call, asking anything unnecessary is inappropriate, and a business dealing with emergencies should drop the question entirely for those.

In a high-volume retail setting, asking every customer is a real cost in time and goodwill, and sampling for one week a quarter gives most of the benefit.

And where the answer would not change anything, the question is only satisfying curiosity. If you have decided to keep every channel regardless, that is a legitimate position, and the honest thing is to skip it rather than collect data ceremonially.

Doing it

1. Ask late, after the enquiry is settled.
2. Use open words, not a list of options.
3. Record it verbatim.
4. Ask what they searched for when they say online.
5. Keep it in the same sheet as the enquiry log.
6. Read the answers aloud once a month.
7. Categorise after thirty, not before.

Step four is the one that pays for the whole exercise.

Choosing the right moment to ask a customer something is covered in the moment to ask for a review.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.