Count the enquiries, not the visits

An agency without measurement can claim more or less anything for a year. Traffic is up, so the work is paying off. The sentence is hard to contradict, and it is false as often as it is true.

Traffic can rise because an article pleased people who will never buy. It can rise because a page has started answering a question close to your trade but asked by students. Meanwhile quote requests stay flat, and nobody notices because nobody counts them.

Start from the event, not from the dashboard

Most dashboards show visits, page views and a bounce rate. None of those three figures says whether the site brings in anything.

So we start from the event that matters to the company. A form sent, a call placed from the site, an appointment booked, an order. That is the event we track, and it is the one we set against the cost of the channel that produced it. The rest, visits and time on page, helps explain why. It never settles anything.

The practical difference is stark. With visits, you can argue a channel is working for twelve months. With enquiries received, the question is settled within a quarter, and sometimes the wrong way. That is exactly what you want from a measurement.

The list of events is written before the installation

The order matters. Writing the list of events before installing anything forces a conversation that is not technical at all: what, in your business, looks like the beginning of a sale.

The answer is never the same. For an online shop, it is the order. For a firm selling long engagements, it is an incoming call, and the call happens off the site, which changes how it is counted. For a cultural venue, it is a booking, and the booking often lives in a third-party tool that has to be queried.

Installing first and then wondering what you measure produces a complete and useless dashboard.

Consent is not a formality

This measurement carries a legal constraint that many treat carelessly. A tool like Google Analytics drops non-essential cookies. It therefore requires prior consent — in the sense the European Data Protection Board’s guidelines give that word — refusal as easy as acceptance, and nothing may load before the person has chosen.

A banner that ticks everything in advance is not consent. Nor is a banner where accepting takes one click and refusing takes three screens. In both cases the risk is carried by the company operating the site, not by the agency that installed the banner.

There is a consequence nobody likes hearing: part of your audience will refuse, and your figures will be incomplete. Better an incomplete figure whose bias you know than a complete one obtained by not offering the choice.

This site applies the rule

The point can be checked without taking our word for it. This site carries a consent banner, loads nothing before the choice is made, and refusal takes the same number of clicks as acceptance. It is the only demonstration that counts on this subject: an agency selling compliant measurement while tracking its own visitors before their consent has answered the question.