Notes for owners · Websites and conversion
Website analytics for a small business that answers one question: where did the enquiry come from
Set up three events, read one report, and match both to your enquiry register. A plain analytics set-up for a small business that wants sources of enquiries, not visitor totals.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
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For a small business, a website report is useful if it answers one question: which source gave us an enquiry? You need three events: a tap on the phone number, a tap on the WhatsApp button and a form submission. You need one report that splits those events by source. And you need to put that report beside your own enquiry register, because the register knows about the calls, walk-ins and referrals that analytics never sees.
Why the usual dashboard does not help
Open a typical report and you meet visitors, page views, bounce rate, average time and a map of the world. None of those figures tells you whether the phone rang. Visitors from a country you do not serve are not a result. A long time on a page may mean interest or may mean the visitor could not find your number.
The numbers are not wrong. They answer questions you did not ask. The owner's question is narrower: of the people who got in touch, how did they find us, and what did they do first? Everything below is built to answer only that.
The three events
An event is a small note the site makes when someone does a particular thing. You need three.
| Event | What triggers it | Where to place it | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone tap | A tap on any link starting with the telephone prefix | Header, footer, contact page, every service page | Number typed as plain text, so nothing can be tapped |
| WhatsApp tap | A tap on the chat link or button | Wherever the button appears | Several buttons counted as one, or none counted |
| Form sent | The thank-you page opening, or the form's own confirmation | The form's after-submit step | Counting the button press, not a completed form, so errors inflate the count |
Name the events plainly, for example call_tap, whatsapp_tap and form_sent, and write the names down. Mark all three as conversions in your tool. Nothing else needs marking at the start.
Test each yourself on a phone. Tap the number, press the button, send a dummy form, and see whether the event shows up in the live view. This short check catches many of the problems that later make the report look empty.
The one report
Build a table with the source in rows and the three events in columns. The source is where the visit came from: search, a Maps listing, a social platform, an advert, a link from another site, or direct. Beside it, add a column for visits so you can see the share that acted.
If you run adverts, tag their links so they show as a campaign and not as "direct". The guide to UTM tags for campaigns covers the tagging, and it is worth reading before you spend. Keep the report at this size. Ask for a longer one only when a decision needs it.
Reading it beside your enquiry register
Your register is a sheet, kept by whoever answers the phone, with one row per enquiry: date, name, how it arrived, what they asked for, and what happened. Analytics sees only the part of that sheet that touched the site.
Once a stretch has finished, count the register by how each enquiry arrived. Then count the events in the report. Three outcomes are common, and each means something different.
- The two roughly agree. Your tracking is sound, and the source split can be trusted.
- The register shows many more phone enquiries than the report shows call taps. Many callers use a Google Maps listing, a printed number or a directory. Compare against the profile's own call count if it has one, and do not conclude that the site does nothing.
- The report shows many form submissions that never appear in the register. Check for spam, test entries or a form that sends mail nobody reads.
Write one sentence under the comparison saying which source you would renew, cut or test. That sentence is the only output that matters.
A trekking-gear shop in Dehradun
An invented example. A shop in Dehradun sells tents, jackets and boots. The owner pays for Google adverts and posts photographs on Instagram, and the report shows plenty of visitors from Instagram and few from search. The owner is ready to drop the adverts.
The owner sets up the three events and, for a few weeks, checks them against the register. Most phone-tap events are credited to search. Several register rows for callers who first reached the site from Instagram say "saw the boots on Instagram, then searched the shop name". Instagram showed them the product; they then searched the shop's name and tapped the number from the search result. Search carried the enquiry and Instagram was the reminder, and a bare visitor count would have hidden that. The picture is still untidy: about a third of register rows have no source written down, so the owner cannot say how far the pattern holds.
The adverts stay for now. The owner stops counting Instagram visits as enquiries, and the person at the counter starts asking every caller one question: what did you search for?
Where this set-up misleads you
It cannot see a customer who read your site on a laptop, then called from their office days later. It misses people who decline tracking. It treats a mistaken tap on the number as an enquiry. And it says nothing about quality: a hundred taps from a source that never buys are worth less than ten from one that does.
So add a column to the register: did it lead to a quotation or an order? Source quality is judged there. The notes on attribution for an SME go further on that, and call tracking is worth considering once calls dominate.
Do it in one afternoon
Install the tool, add the three events, test them on your phone, mark them as conversions and build the one table. Then ask whoever answers the phone to start writing the source on every register row from today, because that column is what makes the report believable. Where your enquiries come from is the base of all your marketing decisions. If you want the set-up built around your own records, see website analytics and conversion tracking and tell us what you need.
