Marketing attribution for an SME: how to know which source brought the order

You spend on a listing, a dealer scheme and a social page, and every month someone asks which of them is paying for itself. The honest answer lives in a question your staff forget to ask. To know which source brought an order, give every enquiry a source at the moment it arrives, ask the customer one question on the first call, and carry the source through to the invoice. That is the whole method for a firm with a modest number of enquiries. A dashboard does not replace it, because many of your enquiries start on a phone call or a WhatsApp message that no dashboard sees.

Why the dashboard says "direct" for so many orders

This is an invented example, names and numbers included. A Coimbatore wet-grinder maker's website shows 40 visits a week, an IndiaMART listing brings buyer calls, a dealer in Madurai mentions the firm to shop owners, and the Instagram page has a few thousand followers. The analytics screen reports most visitors as "direct", because they typed the name after hearing it somewhere else.

The dashboard saw the last click. It did not see the dealer, the hoarding outside the Pollachi highway showroom, or the cousin who said "ask the grinder people on Avinashi Road". Three of the four best sources leave no trace online at all.

So the first rule: the record of where an enquiry came from has to be made by a person, at the time, in your own sheet.

The one question, worded so people answer it

Put it early. By the end of a call the customer is thinking about price and has forgotten how they arrived.

Ask: "Before I take down your details, how did you come to call us?" Then stay quiet. People who hear "Was it Google or Facebook?" pick one of the two to be polite.

Write down their words, not your category. "Saw the van at Gandhipuram signal" is more useful than "outdoor". You will group the answers later, and the odd ones often teach you something you would have deleted.

For enquiries that arrive without a call, such as a web form or a WhatsApp message, add the same question as a field or as your first reply. "Thanks for writing. May I ask how you found us?" costs one line.

The sheet: five columns are enough

Keep the customer's own words in one column and your tidy group in another. The tidy group lets you count. The raw words let you check whether your groups are honest.

Fix the group list at about ten values and never add one on the spot. If a new kind of source keeps appearing, add it at the end of the month. How to track lead source in your CRM covers locking the field once you move from a sheet to software.

Reading the sheet: three counts, not one

Counting enquiries by source tells you who is noisy. It does not tell you who pays. Read three columns side by side for each group:

1. Enquiries received.
2. Enquiries that became quotes.
3. Orders, and the value of the order if you can recover it from the invoice.

In the grinder maker's case, IndiaMART brought the most calls and the fewest orders. Dealer referrals brought a handful of calls and most of the large orders. A dashboard ranked by volume would have said to spend more on the listing. Acting on the sheet was not painless: the maker paid dealers a higher commission for a quarter and the first two months looked worse, with fewer enquiries in total.

Then divide what you spent on each source by its orders. For a dealer commission, the cost is the commission paid. For a hoarding, the rent. If you cannot name a cost for a source, such as word of mouth, say so and leave the cell empty rather than writing zero. Cost per lead and customer acquisition cost shows how to do that division honestly.

Where this method misleads you

Customers name the last thing they saw. Someone who first met your dealer, then searched your name on Google, will say "Google". Your sheet will then overcredit search and undercredit the dealer.

Two checks keep you honest. First, add a second question when the order closes: "Who else did you speak to about us?" A buyer often names a person the first answer left out. Second, treat the source ranking as a lead, not a verdict. If the sheet says dealers matter, test it by giving the three best dealers a better sample kit for a quarter and watch the sheet.

The method also fails when staff skip the question. One person owning the sheet, and reading the "could not say" count aloud each time, fixes it faster than any reminder.

The quarter-end reading

Once a quarter, sit with the sheet for an hour and do four things.

1. Group the "could not say" rows. If they exceed a third, the question is being asked too late.
2. List each source with enquiries, quotes and orders in three columns.
3. Pick the one source that looks best and the one that looks worst. Do not act on the other eight.
4. For each of those two, write one test for next quarter, such as better sample kits for dealers or a cheaper listing tier, and a date to look again.

A small sheet read four times a year is worth more than a large one read never.

When to buy software for this

Not yet, if one person can still read every enquiry. A spreadsheet with a source column, kept honestly, beats a tool that nobody fills in.

Move to a CRM and proper tracking once enquiries come from several people's phones, or when you run paid campaigns that need clicks matched to calls. Even then the customer's own answer stays in the record, because it catches what tracking cannot.

Ask on the next ten calls

Add the source column today. Ask the question on the next ten calls, then read the table. Marketing attribution is the service for setting up the sheet and reading it against your spend, and it sits within your wider marketing. To start, tell us what you need.