Ask any business owner where their customers come from and you get an immediate answer. Referrals, usually, or "mostly word of mouth".
Ask them to prove it and almost nobody can, because the source was never recorded.
Why the guess is usually wrong
Memory favours the memorable. A large customer who came through a referral becomes the story. Twenty smaller ones who found you online become "a few from the website".
The result is that money and effort go towards the channel that produced the best anecdote, not the most business.
Volume is the wrong measure anyway
The channel that produces the most enquiries is often not the one that produces the most revenue. Four numbers per source tell the real story:
- How many enquiries
- How many became customers
- Average value
- How long they stayed
A source with few enquiries but a high conversion rate and long-lived customers is worth more than one producing volume that never closes.
Recording it is one field
Ask every new enquiry how they heard about you, and write it down. That is the whole exercise. Six months of that answers a question most businesses have been guessing at for years.
What to do with the answer
Usually two things. Do more of whatever the strongest source is, deliberately rather than accidentally. And stop paying for whatever produces enquiries that never convert.
Both of those decisions are obvious once the numbers exist and impossible before.
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