Can you tell which marketing activity is driving enquiries?

Ask most service businesses where their work comes from and word of mouth sits near the top of the answer, usually said with some pride. It's often true as well. What tends to get missed is what happens between somebody being recommended and somebody picking up the phone. In that gap they'll usually search for the business by name, read through the reviews, have a look at the website and perhaps find an article or a post that shows how the company works. Then they get in touch, and depending on how the lead gets recorded it goes down as word of mouth, or as organic search if the last thing they did was click a Google result. Each record is accurate as far as it goes, and each one only captures a single moment in a decision that took several.

This article is for businesses that are getting enquiries but couldn't say with much confidence which parts of their marketing are behind them, whether that's the website, search, LinkedIn, email or the reputation that produces the referrals in the first place. The record of where a lead came from tends to steer where time and money go next, so it's worth having one that reflects more than the last thing somebody clicked.

Perfect attribution isn't realistic for most businesses and you don't need it. What you need is enough evidence to see what's helping and what isn't, and most of that comes from ordinary things. Using the information you already have, asking customers directly, making the important routes easier to trace and watching for patterns over time will get most businesses a good way there.

Start with the information you already have

Most businesses have more information than they use. Website forms often record where a visitor came from, analytics shows which channels bring visits and which of those turn into enquiries, Search Console shows what people typed into Google before landing on the site, and email and campaign tools keep their own numbers. If you have a CRM there may be a lead source field in there as well. The usual issue is that each of these gets looked at on its own, so a LinkedIn post that never produced a form submission looks as if it did nothing, even if the person who read it searched for the company a week later.

Searches for your own business name are worth a look in particular. Somebody typing in your company name has almost always heard of you from somewhere else, so a rise in those searches after a busy stretch of referrals, events or posting tells you something that direct conversions won't.

Ask people how they found you, then compare the answers

"How did you hear about us?" won't give you clean attribution, but it adds context that analytics can't see, particularly when a journey has moved between online and offline. It doesn't need to be a compulsory field on the contact form. It works well as part of a sales call, onboarding or a follow-up once an enquiry turns serious, as long as the answers get written down somewhere consistent so patterns can show up over time.

A second question worth adding is what they looked at before getting in touch. The interesting cases are the ones where the two records disagree. If your form says Google and the customer says a colleague recommended you, neither is wrong. It suggests the recommendation created the interest, and your search visibility, reviews and website did the work of turning that interest into an enquiry. A business that only reads the source field will underrate one half of that, and which half depends on which record it trusts.

Make the important routes easier to trace

A few small changes improve the information you get without turning it into an analytics project. Links in emails, social posts and campaigns can carry tracking tags so visits can be traced back to where they came from. Form submissions, bookings and calls from the website can be set up as measured actions, and call tracking is worth considering if phone enquiries make up a large part of the business. If leads move into a CRM, it helps to store the original source against the contact, so it's still there months later when the sales team have spoken to them and the trail would otherwise have disappeared. When several activities are running at once, this is usually what shows which ones are worth carrying on with.

Look for patterns, then decide

You won't trace every enquiry through every interaction, and that's fine, because what you're after is a picture good enough to act on. Qualified enquiries from search rising in step with improved visibility is a useful sign. Case studies coming up repeatedly in sales conversations means they're helping win work, even if they rarely bring anyone to the site for the first time. Customers regularly mentioning LinkedIn is worth taking seriously even when LinkedIn itself reports hardly any direct conversions.

Over a few months those signals help with the decisions that matter, such as what deserves more time or budget, what needs changing and what has been keeping everyone busy without contributing much. Measurement earns its place when it feeds those decisions, so it's worth being wary of any report that gets produced every month without changing what anyone does.

Why we look at the channels together

This is one of the reasons we try not to treat channels in isolation at EDP. Search might introduce somebody to a business, the website builds their confidence, an article answers a question they had and something else brings them back a few weeks later. Looking at SEO, content, the website and analytics together, around how the business really wins work, makes it far easier to see where the journey is working and where it loses people. That applies whether we're acting as the wider digital team or working alongside somebody in the business who already owns marketing.