Phone Calls, Walk-Ins and the Numbers You Never See

Where local business actually converts

Not in a checkout. On a phone call, at a counter, in a van on the way to something else.

The website's job for most trades and local services is to produce a call or a visit, and then it is finished.

Everything that determines whether that was valuable happens somewhere your analytics has no visibility of at all.

So a business can be measuring diligently and still have no idea which of its marketing produces work, because the measurement stops at exactly the point where the interesting part begins.

The tap is not the call

Worth separating, because businesses often believe they have this covered.

You can record that somebody tapped a phone number on your site, and that is genuinely useful.

It is not the same as a call. Some taps do not connect. Some people read the number and dial it later from a different phone. Plenty write it down.

And a tap tells you nothing about what happened: whether it was answered, whether it was a customer or a supplier, whether it became a job.

Treat taps as an indicator of intent and count actual calls separately.

A separate number for the website

The single most effective technique available, and it is not expensive.

Publish a distinct phone number on the website only, forwarding to wherever calls normally go.

Anything arriving on that number came from the site. No tracking, no scripts, no consent question, and it works for somebody who wrote the number on a scrap of paper three days ago.

The same approach extends to anywhere else you appear: a different number on the van, another in a directory listing, another on a leaflet.

Two cautions. Consistency of your business details across the web matters for local search, so keep your main number as the one in your listing and directories, and use distinct numbers for the channels you are testing rather than replacing everything.

And make sure whoever answers cannot tell the difference, so the caller's experience is identical.

Ask, and write down the answer

Less elegant and frequently more informative.

Whoever takes the call asks how the caller found you, and records the answer in their words rather than choosing from a list.

The verbatim answers are where the value is. Somebody saying they saw your van outside a neighbour's house is a different fact from the box marked other.

This has to be a habit rather than a system. Two weeks of consistent asking produces a usable picture; a form field nobody fills in produces nothing.

What to record for every enquiry

• Date and how it arrived: call, form, walk-in, text.
• How they found you, in their own words.
• What they wanted.
• Whether it was quoted.
• Whether it was won, and for how much.

Six fields, one line per enquiry, filled in as it happens rather than reconstructed later.

A worked example

A flooring company believed their website did nothing, since almost no enquiries came through the contact form.

They put a distinct number on the site, kept their main number everywhere else, and started asking every caller how they found them.

Over three months the website number took forty-one calls.

The form, over the same period, received four.

Roughly one in ten visitors who reached the contact page called, and none of that had ever appeared anywhere, because they had been measuring form submissions as the site's output.

The website was their second-largest source of work and they had been considering cancelling the hosting.

Walk-ins and the counter

Harder, and there are still things worth doing.

Ask at the point of sale, briefly, and record it. A tally sheet by the till with five categories works better than an elaborate system nobody maintains.

Where you publish something specific to one channel, such as a price or a promotion mentioned only on the site, references to it are evidence in themselves.

And a printed code or a mention-this-page line gives you a countable marker, provided you accept that most people will not use it and treat the count as a floor rather than a total.

Reconcile against jobs, not enquiries

The step that changes decisions rather than merely producing numbers.

Sources differ enormously in what they are worth, and enquiry counts conceal that completely.

A channel producing thirty enquiries that convert at one in ten, at small values, may be worth less than one producing eight that convert at half, at three times the value.

Because your enquiry record already carries quoted and won and value, this is a matter of sorting the sheet rather than any additional work.

Most businesses that do this once discover their ranking of channels was wrong, usually because volume had been standing in for value.

Keep it proportionate

The technique should cost less than the decision it informs.

For a business taking two hundred calls a month, a call tracking service with recording and reporting may be entirely justified.

For one taking fifteen, a second phone number and a notebook produce the same answer for almost nothing.

The failure mode here is buying a system, using it for six weeks, and abandoning it, which leaves you with less than the notebook would have.

The counter-case

There are reasons not to do all of this, and they deserve stating.

Asking every caller how they found you is a small tax on every conversation, and in a business where the first thirty seconds matter, it can be intrusive. Asking later in the call, once the enquiry is established, usually solves it.

Multiple phone numbers add administrative overhead and can genuinely confuse things if a number is retired without redirection.

And if you have one marketing channel and no plans to change it, measuring which channel works is answering a question you are not going to act on. Spend the effort on the work instead.

The setup

1. Put a distinct number on the website only.
2. Keep your main number in your listing and directories.
3. Ask every caller how they found you, and record it verbatim.
4. Log every enquiry from any channel, six fields.
5. Record quoted, won, and value.
6. Sort by value won after three months, not by count.

Step six is where the surprise usually is.

Work arriving from something you cannot measure is covered in the job that came from a van sign.

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.