Conversions That Never Got Rebuilt

The gap that is easy to miss

A new property installed correctly starts counting visits immediately, with no configuration at all.

So the reports fill up, the numbers look reasonable, and everything appears to be working.

What does not happen automatically is any of the counting that tells you which visits produced something.

Those were configured in the old property, individually, and none of that configuration carried over.

What has to be rebuilt

• Form submissions.
• Telephone taps.
• Booking or purchase completions.
• Anything you marked as a goal.
• The values attached to them.

The first is the one most small businesses actually use, and it is the one most often missing. A property counting visits and not form submissions is answering the least useful of the two questions.

Check what is being counted

Which takes three minutes.

Open the conversions or events section of the new property and read the list.

If it contains only the automatic ones such as page views and scrolls, nothing of yours has been set up.

If your form submission is listed, check the count against a month you know, since a listed event firing zero times is the same as no event.

Do the same for a telephone tap, which is the second most useful and is almost never configured.

Anything with a plausible name and a count of zero is the specific thing to investigate.

Check the count over a month rather than a week, since a genuinely quiet fortnight and a broken event look identical over seven days.

A worked example

A business switched in January and had been reading their new reports monthly since.

In June somebody asked what the conversion rate had been, and the answer was that nothing had been counted.

The property had five months of visits and no record of a single enquiry, because the goals from the old property had never been recreated.

Setting up two events took about twenty minutes with the platform's own guidance.

The five months could not be recovered, so their comparison starts in June rather than in January.

Nobody had noticed because visits alone had looked entirely normal.

Two is enough

Since the temptation is to rebuild everything that existed.

A form submission and a telephone tap cover the overwhelming majority of what a small business needs to know.

Add a booking or purchase if you have one, and stop.

The eleven goals somebody configured in 2019 were mostly never looked at, and rebuilding them is a day spent producing numbers nobody reads.

Fewer, correct, and actually checked beats a complete recreation of a configuration you had already outgrown.

Mark those two or three as conversions explicitly, which is a separate step from the event existing.

The telephone tap is not a call

Worth stating while setting it up.

A tap on a telephone number records the intent to call, not a conversation.

Some taps are accidental, some are cancelled, and some are somebody copying the number to use later.

So the figure is a useful indicator and it is not your call count, and treating it as one produces a conversion rate that is too high.

Count it, watch its direction, and reconcile it against your actual calls occasionally.

Check it fires from a real device

Since configuration and function are different things.

Submit your own form from a phone and watch the event appear.

Tap your own telephone link and check the same.

Then look again the following day to confirm both appear in the ordinary reports rather than only in the live view.

An event configured, listed, and never firing is the most common outcome of a rushed setup, and it looks identical to a correct one in the interface.

Do it before the deadline

Because the old property is what tells you whether the new figures are plausible.

While both are running you can compare a week's form submissions in each and see whether they roughly agree.

After the switch you have nothing to check against and no way to know whether the count is right.

That comparison is the only validation available and it disappears at the end of the month.

Three weeks is enough to set it up and watch one week of both.

Give them a value if the numbers support it

Worth doing once, since it changes how the figures read.

Attaching a value to a form submission converts the conversion count into something that can be weighed against advertising spend or against the cost of a change.

The figure to use is your average job value multiplied by the proportion of enquiries that become jobs, which most businesses can estimate within twenty per cent.

An enquiry worth two hundred dollars on average makes a page producing four a month legible in a way a count of four does not.

Round it heavily and revisit it once a year, since a rough value used consistently is more useful than a precise one nobody maintains.

The counter-case

Not everybody needs this.

A business that counts enquiries in a spreadsheet from its own inbox already has a more reliable figure than any event.

The tracked version is useful for attributing enquiries to pages and sources, which matters more for some businesses than others.

And a very small site produces counts too low to be read monthly, which is an argument for quarterly rather than for not counting.

The setup is the same either way, and it is the reading interval that should change rather than whether to bother.

Check the events list today, set up two, test both from a phone, and compare against the old property this month.

The twenty minutes

1. Open the events list.
2. Look for a count of zero.
3. Set up a form submission.
4. Set up a telephone tap.
5. Mark both as conversions.
6. Test from a real phone.
7. Compare a week against the old one.

Step two finds most of these, since an event with a plausible name and no count is what a rushed configuration produces and it looks correct at a glance.

Which ones are worth having is covered in setting up conversions in the new property.

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.