Your Site Looks Busy. Is It Working?

We've been digging through analytics with a handful of business owners lately, and we keep running into the same thing. The website has traffic, the report has a chart going up and to the right, and nobody can tell us how many people actually filled out the form, called, or bought something. If you want to know whether your site is doing its job, you have to track website leads, not just visitors, and a lot of sites quietly aren't doing that.

Busy isn't the same as working

Visits, page views and time on site feel good, and they're usually the first numbers a report shows you. But a visit is somebody walking past the front window. The number that matters is the one action you built the site for, whether that's a quote request, a phone call, a booking or a sale.

Every business has one of those, and it's usually obvious once you say it out loud. A plumbing company wants the phone to ring. A coach wants the first call on the calendar. A shop wants the checkout to finish. If the site can't count that one thing, it can't tell you whether it's working.

What we keep finding

The checkout happens in a separate cart tool, and the sale never makes it back to the analytics, so the report shows zero sales in a month where people clearly bought. The contact form sends the email just fine, but nothing records that it was sent, so the reports can't tell a great month from a dead one. A button gets more clicks while visits go down, and nobody can say whether those clicks turned into anything. On another site, three different ad platforms each reported a different number for the same purchases, and none of them matched what was actually paid.

None of those owners did anything wrong. The site got built, the tracking got set up once, and then something changed, like a new form, a new cart or a plugin update, and nobody noticed the counting stopped. The truth is the report still looked busy, so it felt like everything was fine.

Why it matters

If you can't count the one thing, every decision about the site is a guess. You can't tell whether the new homepage helped. You can't tell which ads are paying for themselves. You can't tell whether the form broke last Tuesday.

We've watched owners get ready to redesign a site that was probably working, and we've watched others keep paying for one that probably wasn't. In both cases the numbers they were looking at couldn't tell them the difference, and that bothers us a lot more than any ugly homepage.

How to track website leads without a big project

This part is very fixable, and it isn't a new website or a big budget. Most of it starts with an hour and a cup of coffee.

Start by naming the one action, in one sentence, the way you'd explain it to a new employee. Then do it yourself. Fill out your own contact form, tap the call button on your phone, or buy the cheapest thing in your store, and then check your analytics the next day to see whether it showed up. In Google Analytics those are called key events now (they used to be called conversions, because renaming things is apparently a hobby). If you can't find your test anywhere, the site isn't counting it.

Then compare what your analytics says against what actually happened. Look at the form emails in your inbox, the calls in your phone log and the orders in your store. They'll never match perfectly, but they should be in the same neighborhood. If your inbox is full of form emails and your reports show two, something is broken, and now you know where to look.

Once the counting is right, a heatmap tool can show you where people hesitate on the way to that one action. But the counting comes first, because everything after it depends on the number being real.

Business Owners, what's the one thing your website is supposed to get people to do, and do you know how many people did it last month?