Counting enquiries: the setup that takes one afternoon
One sheet, four columns, one question asked every time. Date, channel, outcome, value is the whole system, and the one question that makes it work is how did you find us, asked before anything else. Ten minutes of setup and about thirty seconds per enquiry.
Why the sheet beats the tool
Analytics software counts what happens on a website. Most local enquiries do not: they arrive by telephone, by a message, or through a person who looked at three sources and then walked in. A tool that cannot see those will confidently report the channels it can see and quietly mislead you about the rest.
A sheet has the opposite property. It sees everything you write into it, and nothing else, which makes its blind spots your own decision rather than a surprise.
The cost is small enough to remove the excuse. Setting up four columns takes 10 minutes, and filling one row takes about 30 seconds. At 20 enquiries a month that is 10 minutes of work per month.
The four columns, and the one question
Date, channel, outcome, value. Four columns, and the third and fourth are usually filled later, when the enquiry either became an order or did not.
The channel column is the one that fails, and it fails for a single reason: nobody asked. The question is how did you find us, asked before the price, and it takes 3 seconds. Without it you will record telephone as a channel, which tells you nothing, since telephone is how they contacted you and not how they found you.
After 1 month you have a closing rate. After 3 you can tell a stable channel from a lucky one. After 12 you have a value per channel in euros, which is what makes a renewal decision take a minute rather than an argument. And you will have caught the thing every business discovers this way: a channel that produces plenty of enquiries and almost no orders.
| Column | Filled when | What it later tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Date | At the enquiry | Rate per month, seasonality |
| Channel | At the enquiry, by asking | Which sources produce work |
| Outcome | When decided | Closing rate per channel |
| Order value | At invoicing | Value per enquiry, per channel |
Two mistakes to avoid
Do not record the last thing they clicked. Someone who read six sources and then searched your name is not a search customer, and recording them as one is how brand searches end up credited with everything.
Do not skip the enquiries that went nowhere. A channel is judged on the ratio, and a sheet that only contains the successes cannot produce one.
Questions and answers
Is a spreadsheet really enough?
What exactly should I ask?
How long until it is useful?
What about walk ins?
Sources
- Seer Interactive, AI traffic conversion study Why closing rates by source differ enough to be worth recording
- Google Search Central, AI features in Google Search That AI feature clicks are not reported separately, so tools cannot separate them for you
