How Do You Know Where a Lead Actually Came From?

Somebody rings, you book the job, you do the work. Three weeks later you are deciding whether to keep paying for ads, and the only evidence you have is a feeling.

Lead attribution is the unglamorous thing that makes every other marketing decision possible, and most trade businesses run without it for years.

Why asking them does not work

"How did you hear about us?" is the standard method and it is the least accurate one available.

Three reasons it fails:

• People report the last step, not the first. They saw your van in March, searched your name in June, and will tell you they found you on Google. The van did the work and gets no credit.
• Nobody knows what an ad is. To a customer, an ad at the top of Google is Google. Paid and organic are indistinguishable to almost everyone, which systematically inflates one and erases the other.
• Half of them are not asked. Whoever answers the phone on a busy Tuesday is not running a survey.

So the answers skew towards the obvious and the recent, and you end up cutting the channel that was actually feeding the pipeline.

The four methods, worst to best

1. Asking. Free, immediate, unreliable. Keep doing it as a backstop and a conversation starter, but do not base a budget on it.

2. A log. Every enquiry written down with a date and a best guess at the source. Low-tech and more useful than it sounds, because patterns show up over a few months even when individual entries are wrong.

3. A separate number per channel. This is the step that changes things. A different phone number on your ads to the one on your website means every call separates itself with no effort and no asking. Cheap, and it answers the biggest question most trade businesses have, which is whether the ads are producing anything at all.

4. Source fields on forms. A hidden field that records which page the form was submitted from and which campaign brought them. Every form submission arrives already labelled.

Three and four together get you most of the way. Nothing gets you all of the way, and a method that claims to is not being honest with you.

Setting up the phone split

The minimum useful version takes an afternoon.

1. Get a second number. Most providers will divert one to your existing phone for a few dollars a month.
2. Put it on your Google Ads account and nowhere else. Not the website, not the van, not the profile.
3. Put your main number everywhere else.
4. Answer both the same way, but note which one rang.

That is it. From then on, every ad call is identifiable without asking anybody anything. When you next sit down to work out whether the ads are worth it, you will have counts instead of impressions, which is the difference between reading a Google Ads report and being lied to by one.

What forms should be capturing

Every enquiry form should quietly record, at minimum:

• The page it was submitted from
• The campaign or source that brought the visitor, if there was one
• A timestamp

None of that is visible to the customer and none of it slows the form down. If your current form sends you a name, a phone number and a message with no context, you are throwing away the easiest data on the site. Worth checking at the same time whether the form works at all, because a contact form that gets no submissions is a more common problem than a badly labelled one.

The number you will not get

Some share of your enquiries will stay unattributed. People who heard about you from a neighbour, saw the van, remembered the name from two years ago.

That is not a failure of your tracking. Word of mouth and physical presence are real channels that no analytics tool can see, and in trades they are often the biggest ones. The mistake is assuming that because they are invisible they are not happening, and cutting the things that feed them.

Fifteen years in plumbing taught me that the best source of work is a customer who already trusts you, and no dashboard will ever show you that arriving.

Where to start this week

Get the second phone number. It is the highest-value hour in this whole subject and it costs almost nothing.

If nobody has the time to keep even a rough log, that is worth noticing rather than working around. It is one of the clearer signs that you have reached the point of handing the marketing over.

Then add the source fields to your forms, which is usually a small job on an existing site and should be standard on a new one. If you are not sure whether yours are capturing anything, that is one of the things a look at how your site is actually performing should tell you, rather than leaving you to guess for another quarter. It matters more where one job is worth a great deal more than another, which is why it comes up early in marketing an electrical business.