It counts visits, not enquiries
Analytics tools report sessions and page views by default. Those are not what you sell. A form submission and a phone call need to be recorded as events with a source attached. Without that, the report tells you which channel brought a visitor, not which brought a customer.
Start by listing what counts as a lead for your business. Then make each one fire an event, with the page and the source, and test it yourself.
Calls disappear
For most local businesses the phone is the main path, and the phone leaves no trace in analytics. A tracking number that swaps in for visitors from ads, or from search, lets you count calls by source. Without it, the best channel looks like it produces nothing.
Browsers block part of it
Ad blockers and privacy settings stop many analytics scripts from loading. The share varies by audience, but it is never zero, so the dashboard always shows fewer people than came. Treat the numbers as a sample that is consistent over time, not as a census, and compare months to months rather than reading one number as the truth.
A tag that runs on your own domain and records only what you need is blocked less often than a third-party script. That is how our tracking tag is built.
The source gets lost on the way
A person clicks an ad, leaves, searches your name a day later and fills in the form. Many setups credit the search and forget the ad. Keep the first source with the visitor across visits, and record both the first and the last touch on the lead. Then you can see which channels start conversations and which close them.
Check the counts against reality every month
- Count the forms in your inbox and the calls in your phone log for the month.
- Compare them to the events in your analytics.
- Investigate any gap larger than you would expect from blocking.
The gap is where the tracking is broken. Fix it, then check again next month. Tracking is not set once; it drifts every time the site changes.