Counting Enquiries Instead of Visits

Why traffic is the wrong headline

Analytics reports visits because visits are what a script can observe.

The business runs on enquiries, and an enquiry that arrives by phone is invisible to the script entirely.

Which means the number presented most prominently is the one least connected to revenue, and businesses end up optimising for it.

A site whose traffic doubled and whose enquiries did not is a worse site than it was, and the report will show it as an improvement.

The three things worth counting

• Form submissions, which are the easiest.
• Phone taps from a mobile device, which analytics can record as an event.
• Actual enquiries, counted by a person, including everything that arrives by phone from a printed number.

The third is the only complete count, and it is the one that requires discipline rather than configuration.

The first two are useful because they are automatic, and incomplete because they miss anybody who wrote the number down.

Tracking a form submission

The starting point and the simplest.

Most analytics tools can record an event when a form is submitted, or when the thank you page loads.

The thank you page approach is easier and slightly less reliable, since it depends on the redirect happening.

Either way, the result is a countable figure: how many enquiries came through the site, by month, and which page they started on.

That last part is where the value is. Knowing that four of six enquiries began on one service page tells you which page to invest in.

Tracking a phone tap

Under-used and genuinely informative for a trade.

A tappable phone number can be set up to record an event when somebody taps it.

That is not a completed call, since somebody may tap and immediately hang up, and it remains a strong signal of intent and it is countable over time.

For a business where most enquiries arrive by phone, this converts an invisible channel into something with a trend.

It only captures taps on a mobile device, which is a real limitation and still covers the majority of local service enquiries.

A worked example

A trade business measuring nothing but sessions, which had been broadly flat for two years.

They added form tracking and phone tap tracking, and started a spreadsheet with one row per enquiry: date, source as stated by the caller, and whether it became a job.

Within three months the picture was clear and unexpected.

Sessions were flat and phone taps had risen by about half, because a set of service pages added the previous year were sending people straight to the phone.

The site was working considerably better than the traffic figure suggested, and they had been considering replacing it.

The spreadsheet also showed that a directory listing they were about to cancel was producing a disproportionate share of actual jobs.

What a form submission does not tell you

A caution before treating the tracked figure as the answer.

It counts submissions, not enquiries worth having. A form submitted by somebody outside your area, or asking about work you do not do, counts the same as a real job.

Which means a rise in tracked conversions can accompany a fall in useful enquiries, particularly after a change that broadened who arrives.

The spreadsheet resolves this, because it records whether each enquiry converted, and the two figures together tell you something neither does alone.

The spreadsheet

Unfashionable, cheap, and better than any tool for this purpose.

One row per enquiry. Date, name, how they heard of you, what they wanted, whether it converted, and roughly what it was worth.

Thirty seconds per enquiry, entered at the moment it arrives rather than reconstructed at the end of the month.

After six months that record answers questions no analytics package can: which sources produce work rather than visits, what an enquiry from each source is worth, and whether things are improving.

It also survives every change of tool, platform and provider you will ever make, which no dashboard does.

Asking the question properly

The part that makes the spreadsheet work.

Ask every new enquiry how they came across you, in conversation, early, before anything else.

Not as a form field, where people pick whatever is first or skip it.

Accept vague answers and record them as given. Found you online is less precise than you would like and it is still information, and pressing for detail annoys people.

Over thirty enquiries the pattern is clear even with imprecise answers, and it is far more accurate than attribution based on the last click.

What a conversion rate is worth knowing

Once enquiries are counted, the ratio becomes available, and it is more useful than either figure alone.

Enquiries divided by sessions, expressed as a percentage, tells you how efficiently the site turns visitors into contacts.

For a local service business, anything from one to five percent is ordinary, and the absolute figure matters far less than the direction.

What makes it useful is that it separates two different problems. Falling traffic with a steady rate is a visibility problem; steady traffic with a falling rate is a site problem.

Those need completely different responses, and without the ratio they look identical from the enquiry count alone.

It also lets you judge a change honestly. A new service page that raises traffic and lowers the rate is attracting the wrong people.

The counter-case

Where this is more effort than it is worth.

A business with two or three enquiries a month, where the owner remembers each one and a spreadsheet adds nothing.

A shop selling online, where the transaction is the conversion and it is recorded automatically.

And any business at capacity that is not making decisions about marketing spend, since measurement exists to inform decisions and there are none pending.

For everybody else, particularly anybody spending money on advertising or considering a new website, this record is what makes the decision informed rather than intuitive.

Setting it up

1. Add form submission tracking.
2. Add phone tap tracking on mobile.
3. Start a spreadsheet with one row per enquiry.
4. Ask everybody how they found you.
5. Record whether it converted and roughly what it was worth.
6. Read it every quarter, not every week.

The sixth prevents the most common failure with any of this, which is looking at small numbers far too often and reacting to ordinary noise.

And review it against what you spent, since the point of the record is deciding where the next pound goes rather than admiring the trend.

Why the visit figures mislead is covered in sessions, users and why they disagree.

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.