How to Tell Where Your Enquiries Came From

“Google, mostly.”

That’s the answer we hear most when we ask a business owner where their work comes from. It’s a fair answer, but it’s almost useless. Google covers the organic results, the paid ads, the map listing and now the AI summary sitting above all of them. Each one costs you something different, and each one gets better or worse for different reasons.

You can’t decide where to spend next year’s budget on “mostly”.

Start with the enquiry

Analytics tools get the attention, but the most reliable tracking starts with the enquiry landing in your inbox.

A contact form can quietly record where the person came from without asking them anything. Hidden fields capture the source, the campaign and the first part of your site they landed on, then drop it into the email alongside their name and message. It’s a small job to set up, and it means every form enquiry arrives already labelled.

Add one visible question if you like. “How did you hear about us?” with five short options is enough. People get it wrong sometimes, and that’s fine. When the hidden field says organic search and the customer says “a mate recommended you”, you’ve learned they asked a friend and then looked you up to check. That’s useful.

Phone calls are the blind spot

This is where most tracking falls apart, especially for trades.

Analytics only sees a call when someone taps a click-to-call number on their phone. It misses the desktop visitor who dials from their landline. It misses the person who rang straight from your Google Business Profile without ever opening your site. It misses everyone who copied the number off the side of the van.

Call tracking fills that gap. A service swaps the number shown on your site depending on how the visitor arrived, so a call from a Google Ads visitor rings through on a different number to one from an organic visitor. Both land on your normal phone.

One rule we stick to. Keep your main number on your Business Profile and directory listings, and only use tracking numbers on the site itself. Scattering different numbers across the internet confuses Google about who you are.

Tag your Business Profile link

Here’s a small fix that surprises people. When someone clicks through to your website from your Google Business Profile, analytics usually files that visit under ordinary organic search. Your map listing could be doing half the work and you’d never see it.

Adding a tracking tag to the website link on your profile separates those visits out. Five minutes, and the map listing finally gets the credit it’s earned.

What GA4 will and won’t tell you

Google Analytics 4 is good at counting things. Form submissions, button clicks, phone taps and which channel the visitor arrived from. Google renamed conversions to key events in 2024, so if you go looking for conversions and can’t find them, they’ve only changed name.

It won’t tell you whether an enquiry was any good. A tyre kicker and a $40,000 job look identical in a report. It also misses visitors who block tracking or decline cookies, and it often lumps visits from AI tools, messaging apps and bookmarks under “direct”.

One setting worth changing on day one: data retention. It defaults to two months for detailed reports, and you can raise it to fourteen. Without that, you can’t look back at last summer when you need to.

The spreadsheet beats the dashboard

The most useful tracking tool we know of is a shared spreadsheet. Every enquiry gets a row. Date, source, job type, whether you quoted, whether you won it, and what it was worth.

After three months, patterns show up that no analytics report will give you. The map listing brings smaller jobs that close fast. Organic search brings bigger jobs that take longer. Google Ads brings plenty of calls, half of them out of your area. That’s the kind of thing you can act on.

It’s also the honest way to judge the website metrics that matter for NZ businesses. Revenue by source tells you far less flattering things than sessions and bounce rate, which is exactly what makes it worth knowing.

What to do with the answer

Once you know which searches bring real jobs, you can stop guessing. Money moves to the channels that pay, and a proper SEO strategy can be built around the searches your best customers use.

Sometimes the numbers show plenty of visitors and hardly any enquiries. That’s a different problem, and it’s usually one of the causes behind website traffic with no enquiries.

We’d always rather report on jobs won than on clicks, and it’s the first conversation we have with anyone looking at our digital marketing services in Auckland. Bring us your last twenty enquiries and we’ll help you work out where they came from.