How many enquiries did your website bring last month? Exactly.

How many enquiries came through your website last month?

Most owners answer with a shape rather than a number. A few. Some. Not many these days.

That answer is the actual problem, and it is bigger than whatever is wrong with the website itself.

What you cannot do without the number

You cannot tell whether the site is working, so the yearly decision about whether to spend on it is taken on feel.

You cannot tell whether a change helped. Somebody rewrites the home page, and six months later nobody can say whether it made any difference, so nobody bothers changing anything again.

And you cannot compare it with anything else. Is the website worth more or less than the exhibition you go to every year? Nobody knows, so the money keeps going to whichever one feels more real.

Counting is easier than people assume

You do not need analytics software to begin.

Make sure every enquiry that arrives, by any route, gets a source written against it. Website, reference, WhatsApp, exhibition, walk in. One word, at the moment it arrives.

Do that for three months and you will have something most of your competitors do not have: evidence about where your work comes from.

Many businesses discover their website brings more than they thought and gets less attention than it earns. Others discover it brings nothing at all, which is equally useful, because it means the money should go elsewhere or the site needs real work rather than a new design.

Both answers are better than a feeling.

Start today. One word against every enquiry that arrives. What will you know in three months that you do not know now?

Putting a source against every enquiry, and then showing an owner where his work actually comes from, is usually the first useful thing we do. Ask us how to start counting this week.