When you genuinely do not need it
A handful of enquiries a month, one channel. If everything comes from your Google Business Profile and word of mouth, you already know. Building attribution adds admin without adding information.
No paid spend. If you are not choosing between channels with money, there is no decision for the data to inform.
One person handles everything. They know where each job came from.
Saying this plainly matters, because attribution is frequently sold to businesses too small to use it.
When it becomes necessary
You are spending on more than one channel. Now there is a decision — where the next dollar goes — and no way to make it well by feel.
Volume exceeds memory. Beyond a couple of dozen enquiries a month, recollection becomes unreliable in a specific direction: recent and memorable jobs get overweighted.
More than one person takes enquiries. Nobody sees the whole picture.
You are about to cut or increase spend. That decision on bad data is a coin toss with a confident rationale.
The minimum viable version
Not software. One field on every job record: where did this come from.
Plus asking every caller how they heard about you.
That costs nothing, takes seconds per enquiry, and captures word of mouth and offline sources no tool can see. For most small businesses it is genuinely enough.
The next step up
When paid spend is involved:
- Conversion tracking on forms, firing on submission
- Phone taps tracked on mobile
- Call tracking numbers on the main sources
- Campaign parameters on links you place yourself
That covers what matters, and it is a day of setup rather than a project.
What attribution will never do
Produce a clean single answer. A customer who saw your van, searched, read reviews, asked a neighbour and then called cannot be cleanly assigned.
Anyone selling exact attribution is overselling. What good tracking produces is a defensible ranking of channels and a clear read on which are obviously working — which is enough to decide well.
The cost of not having it
Decisions made on impression. And impressions are biased in a known direction — toward whatever happened most recently and most memorably, which is rarely the same as what produced the most revenue.
The common outcome is cutting the quiet channel that was working and increasing the loud one that was not.
The honest recommendation
Start with the free version today: a source field on every job, and asking every caller.
Add tracking when you start spending money you want to evaluate. Do not buy a dashboard until those two habits are established, because a dashboard displays data — it does not create it.
Getting started
Open a spreadsheet and record today's enquiries. The data does not exist until you begin writing it down.
Frequently asked questions
When do I not need attribution tracking?
When you get a handful of enquiries a month from one channel, when there is no paid spend to choose between channels, and when one person handles everything and already knows.
When does it become necessary?
When you spend across more than one channel, when volume exceeds what anyone can remember reliably, when several people take enquiries, or when you are about to cut or increase spend.
What is the free minimum version?
One field on every job record saying where it came from, plus asking every caller how they heard about you. It captures word of mouth and offline sources no tool can see.
What will attribution never do?
Produce a clean single answer. A customer who saw your van, searched, read reviews and asked a neighbour cannot be cleanly assigned. Anyone selling exact attribution is overselling.