Almost every small business we talk to knows what it spends and very few know what brought in the last customer. It is not carelessness: knowing where your customers come from looks like a job for complicated dashboards, and it is not. Most of it is solved with one well-timed question and data you already have to hand.
Why knowing where your customers come from changes the budget
Without that figure, the budget gets divided by gut feel. Whatever sounds good stays, whatever is boring gets cut, and you end up paying for years for something that brings in nobody while neglecting what does work. With the figure, the conversation changes: it stops being "how much do we put into social media?" and becomes "where did this month's eleven customers come from?".
There is a useful side effect too. Once you start asking, you discover that a good share of people arrive by word of mouth and then check you out online. That does not invalidate word of mouth: it means what they find when they check you also decides.
The question, and when to ask it
The question is "how did you find us?", and the timing matters. Asked at the start it sounds like an interrogation and the answer is vague. Asked at the close, when there is already trust, people give you the detail: "my brother-in-law told me and then I looked you up", "I saw your sign", "you came up first".
Two rules for it to be worth anything:
- Always the same person asks, or it is written into the process. If whoever remembers does it, the data becomes useless.
- Write it down on the spot, not at the end of the day. A box on the job sheet, a tag on the record or a tick in a notebook is enough.
Thirty or forty answers are enough to see patterns. You do not need more.
The data you already have and never look at
The Google profile tells you where your new customers come from
The most undervalued source there is. It tells you how many people saw you, how many called, how many asked for directions and what they searched for: your name, or what you sell. That distinction is gold, because it separates people who already knew you from people who just found you. Google explains it in its page on understanding your Business Profile performance and insights, and we go into it in our guide to the Google Business Profile.
The business WhatsApp
If you use the business version, you have labels. Tagging every new conversation as "Google", "referral", "Instagram" or "sign" takes two seconds, and by the end of the month you have the split done without opening any tool.
Email and phone
The website form already tells you it came from the website. What is usually missing is which page it came from, and that is fixed with a hidden origin field. We add it by default: every form says which page it came from.
The only thing worth measuring on the site
This is where people get lost, because they install an enormous tool and then never look at it. Three measurements are enough for a local business:
- Clicks on the WhatsApp button.
- Clicks on the phone number.
- Form submissions.
Those three are "contacts", and they are the closest thing to a sale a website can see. Visits are fine for context, but they do not pay invoices. In tool language they are called events, and Google keeps a list of recommended events if you want the technical detail.
One legal note that gets skipped: measuring with cookies requires consent, done properly. Spain's data protection agency publishes a guide on the use of cookies explaining what is and is not allowed. If your site's banner is one of those with only an accept button, it needs reviewing.
Want to know what it would cost you?
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Tagged links, so you do not confuse yourself
If you send the same address in a campaign, in an email and in your Instagram bio, you will not know afterwards which one brought what. It is solved by adding a tag at the end of the link, along the lines of ?source=instagram. You do not need the theory: it is enough that every place you publish your address has its own tag, and that it is always the same one.
That is five minutes of work per channel, and it prevents the end-of-month argument about who gets the credit.
The last-click trap
This is the nuance that changes decisions. Somebody sees you on Instagram on Tuesday, searches your name on Google on Thursday and lands on your site. Whose customer is that? Any tool will credit the search engine, because it looks at the last step. But without Tuesday there is no Thursday.
Which is why it pays to combine the two: the tool's figure and the person's answer. When somebody says "I saw you on Instagram and then looked you up", you have just found out something no dashboard was going to tell you. It is also why searches for your own name climb when you run ads or publish content, even though the search engine takes the credit.
Mistakes we see
- Asking and not writing it down. The answer is forgotten within ten minutes.
- Measuring visits instead of contacts. A thousand visits without a message is not good news.
- Switching channel every month before there is time to see anything. Content and rankings take months, as we cover in how long SEO takes.
- Trusting the last click alone and cutting precisely what was feeding everything else.
The four numbers for the monthly review
Once the habit is there, the monthly review fits in four lines:
- How many contacts came in (WhatsApp, phone and form together).
- Where they say they came from, according to what you have been noting down.
- How many became customers.
- Which channel went up and which went down against last month.
That decides what gets reinforced and what gets cut, without thirty-page reports. What that review should look like when an agency runs it is covered in how to tell if your agency is doing its job.
What it costs to have this set up
Asking and noting costs nothing but consistency. The technical side —contact tracking, forms that say which page they came from and the monthly review— is included in our published plans: 100 € a month for the one-page landing, 200 € for the site with up to ten subpages, and 400, 750 and 1,500 € for the plans adding articles, Google profile, reviews, campaigns and social media. Excluding VAT, no lock-in, migration included.
If you need something beyond the standard —cross-referencing contacts with your management software, for instance— that falls under custom software and is quoted per project.
Start this week
Do not set anything up. Take a notebook, put it next to the phone and write down for a month how each person who gets in touch found you. Four weeks later you will know more about your marketing than any report would tell you, and you will also know what to ask when somebody tries to sell you some.
If you would rather we set it up, message us on WhatsApp with your website address. We will look at what is being measured today and tell you what is missing. No strings, same day.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.