Is Your Website Tracking Leads? How to Check
Here's a question I ask almost every business owner I talk to: "How many leads did your website bring in last month?"
The most common answer is a pause, followed by "I think a few?"
That's not a criticism. Most small business websites are set up to look good, not to report back. But if you can't answer that question, you can't tell which marketing is working, and you can't make good decisions about where to spend next.
The good news is that checking your tracking takes about 30 minutes. Here's how I do it.
What counts as a lead?
Before you check anything, write down every way a customer can reach out to you. For most small businesses, that list looks like this:
Contact or quote request form submissions
Phone calls, especially from people tapping your number on their phone
Emails sent by clicking your email address
Booking or scheduling requests
Calls and website clicks from your Google Business Profile
Every item on that list should be tracked. If one isn't, you're undercounting what your marketing does.
Step 1: Test your own contact form
Go to your website on your phone and fill out your own form, like a customer would. Then check two things:
Did the submission reach you? Check your inbox and your spam folder. I've seen businesses lose leads for months because form notifications went to an old email address nobody checked.
Did your analytics record it? Open Google Analytics and look at the Realtime report. You should see your visit and, if tracking is set up, a form submission or lead event.
If you see the visit but not the form submission, your analytics is counting traffic but not leads. That's the most common gap I find.
Step 2: Check your key events in Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 calls the actions you care about "key events." (They used to be called conversions.) In GA4, go to Admin, then Events and Key events, and look at what's marked.
You're looking for three problems:
Nothing is marked. Analytics is installed but doesn't know what matters to you.
The wrong thing is marked. Page views or scrolls set as key events make your numbers look much better than they are.
Leads are counted twice. If one form submission shows up as two key events, your reports are inflated.
A simple fix that works on almost any site: send people to a dedicated thank-you page after they submit the form. Most website builders, including Squarespace, can do this. Then track visits to that page as your key event. It's not the most sophisticated method, but it's reliable and easy to check.
Step 3: Don't forget phone calls
For many service businesses, phone calls are the biggest source of leads, and they're the most likely to go untracked.
At minimum, make sure your phone number is a clickable link on mobile and track clicks on it as a key event. That tells you how many people tapped to call, even if you can't see what happened on the call.
If you're running Google Ads, use call tracking through Google Ads so calls from ads are counted as conversions. Otherwise, your ads may look like they're failing when they're actually generating calls.
Step 4: Make sure your ad platforms see your leads
If you're running ads, your ad platform needs its own conversion tracking. Google Ads and Meta both optimize toward whatever you tell them is a conversion. If that's missing or wrong, they'll optimize for the wrong thing, and you'll pay for it.
This is one of the first things I check before launching any campaign. It's on my list of what I look at before I spend $1 on ads for a reason.
Step 5: Look at where your traffic is coming from
In Google Analytics, open the Traffic acquisition report. You'll see your visits broken down by channel: organic search, paid search, social, email, referral and direct.
Two warning signs:
Most of your traffic shows as "Direct." That often means links from emails, social posts or other campaigns aren't tagged. Adding UTM parameters to those links fixes it.
Your key events don't show up by channel. If you can see leads but not which channel produced them, you can't compare your SEO, ads and social against each other.
Step 6: Ask people how they found you
Analytics will never be perfect. People see your Google Business Profile, hear about you from a friend, then search your name a week later. Software can't always connect those dots.
So add a simple "How did you hear about us?" field to your contact form, and ask on the phone. Keep a basic spreadsheet if you don't have a CRM. Between your analytics and what customers tell you, you'll have a much clearer picture.
Signs your tracking is broken
If any of these sound familiar, it's worth a closer look:
Analytics shows zero leads, but you know people have contacted you
Your lead numbers jumped overnight without any change in your marketing
Your ad platform reports more conversions than you actually received
You can't say which channel brought in your last five customers
Why this matters more than another marketing channel
When tracking is broken, every marketing decision becomes a guess. You might cut the channel that's quietly bringing in your best customers, or keep paying for one that isn't.
Fixing tracking isn't exciting work. But it's usually the cheapest improvement a small business can make, because it makes everything else you spend smarter. Once it's working, you can actually measure the ROI of your marketing. And if your tracking shows plenty of traffic but very few leads, that's a different problem. Here's why your website might not be getting leads.
Want a second set of eyes?
If you went through these steps and found gaps, or got stuck on step one, I can help. Checking analytics and conversion tracking is part of how I review every new client's marketing before recommending anything else.
Reach out here, and we'll start with a quick conversation about what you're tracking now and what you need to know.