Plain answer

How to track where your new jobs are coming from

SAM COGGIN · SYDEX · 30 AUG 2026

You track website leads by recording two things for every enquiry: where it came from, and what it turned into. Then you join them to the money. Most owners never do the second half, and they know it: when The Marketing Centre asked UK small business leaders to score themselves on measuring marketing return, they averaged 54%, their worst score across all twelve areas of the business. The fix does not start with software. It starts with a biro and one question.

How do I know which marketing actually brings in jobs?

Ask every enquiry where they found you, and write the answer on the job. That is the entire method, and it beats an unconfigured software stack every day of the week. "Googled emergency electrician." "Saw the van outside number 42." "Dave from the rugby club." Every answer goes on the job sheet next to the name and the price.

The write-it-down habit has one advantage no tracking tool can match: it sees word of mouth. Analytics can tell you a visitor arrived from Google; it has no idea that Dave recommended you and the customer only used Google to find your number. Ask the question and you get the true source. Skip it and your best marketing channel, other people's mouths, stays invisible forever.

How do I track leads without a CRM or any software?

A page a week, anywhere you will actually keep it:

MON · boiler service · Google · quoted £90 · WON
TUE · full rewire · word of mouth (Dave) · quoted £3,800 · waiting
WED · fuse board · Facebook · no reply to quote · LOST
FRI · totals: Google 1 job £90 · mouth 0 yet £0 · Facebook 0 £0

One line per enquiry: date, what, source, quoted, outcome. Friday, total it by source. Do that for a month and you will know which marketing pays, which is exactly the question every expensive dashboard claims to answer. The crucial bit the software articles miss: track to the invoice, not the enquiry. Ten enquiries from Facebook that never convert are worth less than two from Google that both pay. An enquiry is a maybe; the invoice is the answer.

What should I be tracking on my website itself?

The automatic layer earns its place for the things paper cannot see, and it needs two plain sentences, not a course:

• Google Analytics is a free counter on your site that shows how many people visited, which searches brought them, and which pages they read. It knows the crowd; it does not know the customer.
• Tagged links are web addresses with a label on the end, so when you put a link in a Facebook post or on the side of the van as a QR code, the counter knows which one got used.

Two warnings from experience. Exclude your own visits, or you will spend a fortnight excited about a visitor who is you on your phone. And remember the counter stops at the enquiry: joining the enquiry to the paid job is your half, on paper or in a proper system. If the site is not producing enquiries worth counting in the first place, that is a different problem with its own fix: how to get more leads without spending more on ads.

What numbers should I look at every week?

Three. Not thirty, three:

• Enquiries by source. Who knocked, and which door they came through.
• Jobs won by source. Which door produces work, not just noise.
• Pounds banked by source. Which door pays the mortgage.

A worked month: Google brought 8 enquiries, 3 jobs, £2,400. Word of mouth brought 4 enquiries, 3 jobs, £5,100. Facebook brought 10 enquiries, 0 jobs, £0. Without the numbers you would conclude Facebook is your busiest channel and feed it more time. With them, you would ask for more referrals, look after your Google presence, and stop polishing posts. That decision, made once a month from three numbers, is worth more than every marketing report ever emailed to you.

What does doing this properly look like?

The paper method works, but it depends on the busiest person in the business, you, never forgetting to ask, write, and total. Doing it properly means the system does the remembering: every enquiry from the website lands already stamped with its source, follows the job from quote to invoice to paid, and a performance page reads the story back daily in plain English: visitors, enquiries by source, jobs won, pounds banked, rankings. You glance at it the way you glance at your bank balance.

That operating layer comes as part of the rebuild, not as another subscription: £2,950 for the rebuild and £295 a month to run it, three month minimum, cancel after. If your current site is too old to bolt any of this onto, and the seven signs will tell you in two minutes, then what the full rebuild should include for that money is broken down in what a new website should cost a small service business in the UK. The short answers to everything else are on the questions everyone asks.