Measurement
What should I track to know which marketing is actually working?
Track five things: where each lead came from, which page produced it, what share of leads become quotes, what share of quotes become jobs, and what a job is worth. Everything else is decoration. Most businesses cannot answer the first two, which is why their reports show traffic going up and revenue standing still.
The short version
- Source and landing page are the two fields that make every other number actionable.
- A single-page site that navigates without reloading will mis-attribute everything unless it is configured not to.
- If a call is your main conversion and you do not track calls, you are measuring the minority of your leads.
- Test your own tracking by becoming a lead. It takes ten minutes and it is the only proof that counts.
How to do it
Decide what counts as a conversion
Not a page view, not a scroll, not a click on an email address. A conversion is an event that a salesperson would recognise: a form with a real job in it, a call over a minute, a booked appointment.
Make sure page views fire on in-site navigation
On a site that swaps pages without a full reload, analytics often keeps reporting the page the visitor first landed on. Every conversion then appears to come from the homepage. Check this before you trust a single report.
Track calls, not just forms
For most local businesses the majority of leads arrive by phone. Tracking only the form means optimising for the minority channel — and it usually means underreporting your best campaigns, because urgent buyers call rather than type.
Tag every link you control
Any link you post — social bio, email, printed QR code, mailer — gets campaign parameters. Untagged links arrive as "direct" and become an unattributable lump that grows until the report means nothing.
Close the loop from lead to money
Push the outcome back. A lead that became a $9,000 job and a lead that was a wrong number should not look the same in your reporting, and they do unless you connect the two systems.
Become a lead yourself, once a quarter
Submit a real enquiry from a phone, from a deep page, and see whether it shows up attributed correctly. Nearly every broken setup we find would have been caught by this ten-minute test.
The five numbers
Marketing dashboards tend to grow until nobody reads them. These five answer the only question that matters — where does the next dollar go — and the rest can be deleted without loss.
- Source of each lead — which channel and which campaign produced it, not "web".
- Landing page of each lead — the page it actually came from, not the session entry page.
- Lead-to-quote rate — what share of enquiries are real enough to quote. This is your traffic quality score.
- Quote-to-job rate — what share of quotes close. This is your sales process, not your marketing.
- Value of a job — including margin and repeat business, because revenue alone will point you at your least profitable work.
The bug that invalidates most small-business analytics
Modern sites often navigate without reloading the page. It feels fast, and it breaks analytics in a specific way that is easy to miss: the tracking code reads the page address once, when it loads, and keeps reporting that address until the tab is closed.
So a visitor lands on the homepage, browses to a service page, and submits a form. The conversion is recorded against the homepage. Do that for a few months and the report says the homepage is the only page producing leads — so the service pages get cut, and leads fall.
We found this exact bug on our own site during an audit. Worth saying plainly: it is not a sign of a bad developer. It is the default behaviour of the tools, and it has to be deliberately corrected.
Attribution is a decision aid, not an accounting system
Every attribution model is wrong in a known direction. Last-click over-credits whatever was nearest the purchase. First-click over-credits discovery. Data-driven models are a black box you cannot audit.
Do not try to resolve this. Use attribution to answer a narrower question: if I doubled this channel next month, would there be more booked jobs? That question survives imperfect data, and it is the only one you were ever going to act on.
Then pair it with the one number no model can argue with — ask every new customer how they heard about you, and write the answer down. It is unscientific, and it consistently catches the channels the analytics cannot see.
What a working setup looks like
A tag manager that loads early enough to catch people who leave quickly, an analytics property receiving page views on every navigation, and conversion events named after outcomes rather than clicks.
A tracking number on the pages and listings where calls come from, so phone leads are attributable. A CRM that stores source and landing page on every lead record, and a status field that gets updated when a job closes.
And one report you actually read each month: leads by source, cost per lead by source, and closed revenue by source. Three columns. If a dashboard has more columns than that, it is being built for the wrong reason.
| Failure | What the report shows | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| Page views not firing on in-site navigation | Homepage credited with almost every conversion | Navigate between pages and watch whether a new page view fires |
| Tag loading after the visitor leaves | Suspiciously low bounce rate, missing sessions | When the container script is requested relative to page load |
| Calls untracked | Ads look unprofitable; phone is busy | Compare call volume to recorded conversions |
| Untagged links | A large and growing "direct" bucket | Whether posted links carry campaign parameters |
| Duplicate analytics installs | Doubled page views, halved engagement rate | Count how many times the measurement ID appears on the page |
| All form fills weighted equally | Falling cost per lead, flat revenue | Whether junk and qualified leads send the same event |
Common questions
- Do I need Google Tag Manager, or just Google Analytics?
- Analytics alone is fine if you only need page views. The moment you want to track calls, form submissions, a booking widget or ad platform conversions, a tag manager stops you having to redeploy the site for every change — and it gives you one place to see everything that is firing, which is where most of the bugs get caught.
- How do I track phone calls from my website?
- Two layers. A click on a phone number on mobile is a trackable event and costs nothing to add. Actual connected calls need a tracking number that swaps in by source, which tells you which campaign produced a call that lasted long enough to be real. For any business where the phone is the main channel, the second layer is worth the monthly fee.
- Why do my ad platform numbers never match my analytics?
- They never will. The ad platform credits a conversion to the click that preceded it within its own window, including view-throughs; analytics credits the last non-direct source in its window. Different questions, different answers. Use the ad platform for bidding decisions and analytics for comparing channels, and stop reconciling them.
- How often should I look at this?
- Monthly for decisions, quarterly for a tracking audit. Weekly reporting on a small business is mostly noise — a slow fortnight looks like a catastrophe and a good one looks like a trend, and both get acted on.
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