How to track where your leads come from

Why track lead sources at all?

Because otherwise you are guessing with real money. You can probably say roughly how many calls came in last month. The harder question is which of those calls became paid jobs, and from which channel. Without that, you can't tell whether the lead platform is paying for itself, whether the new website is working, or whether the yard signs were worth printing.

Tracking doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to be consistent: every lead, every time, with the source recorded in the same place and carried through to the money. Below are five methods that work for a small service company. Start with a fixed source list and asking every caller, then add the others as you spend on more channels.

Start with a fixed list of sources

Before any technology, decide what your sources are and write them down. A typical list:

• Google Business Profile (Maps and local results)
• Website, organic search
• Google Ads or Local Services Ads
• Each lead platform by name
• Referral from a customer
• Referral from a partner business
• Past customer, rebooking
• Yard sign, truck, door hanger
• Social media
• Other (with a note)

Use this list as a dropdown in your CRM, not a free-text box. Free text turns into "google", "Google maps", "GMB", "internet" and "saw it online", which can't be counted. Keep the list short enough that whoever answers the phone can pick one in two seconds.

1. Use tracking phone numbers where they help

A tracking number is a separate phone number that forwards to your main line and logs every call. Put a different one on each thing you want to measure: a print ad, a truck wrap, a direct-mail piece, a paid ad landing page. When it rings, the call log already knows the source.

Two cautions. First, keep your main number consistent across your website footer, your Business Profile and your directory listings, so customers who saved it still reach you. Google's Business Profile guidelines also require any number on your profile to be under the direct control of the business, and they bar numbers that redirect callers to anyone other than the actual business. Use tracking numbers mainly where they don't replace the number customers have saved. Second, a tracking number on a yard sign will keep ringing for years, so pick a provider and plan to keep it. A business phone system can issue extra numbers and log their calls in the same place as everything else.

2. Capture the source on every web form

Your website forms can record where a lead came from without asking the customer anything. A good form setup stores:

• the page the form was submitted from (for example, your gutter cleaning page or a town page);
• the page where the visitor first landed on your site;
• the referring site, if any;
• any UTM tags in the address the visitor arrived on.

These go into hidden fields that travel with the submission straight into your CRM. When we build sites, every quote form sends the request into the CRM with the page it came from, so the lead record shows where it started before anyone calls the customer back. See our website service for how forms feed the CRM.

3. Tag the links you control with UTM parameters

UTM parameters are short tags added to the end of a web address that tell your analytics where a visit came from. Google's Analytics help page on campaign URLs says to always use three of them together (the examples below are ours):

• utm_source: the referrer, such as google, newsletter or facebook;
• utm_medium: the marketing medium, such as organic, email or print;
• utm_campaign: the specific campaign, such as spring-2027 or gbp-website.

Put them on links you place yourself: the website link on your Google Business Profile, links in your emails, QR codes on door hangers, and links in social posts. A tagged Business Profile link, for example, lets your analytics separate visitors who came from your profile from those who found the site through regular search. Keep the values lowercase and consistent, and keep a simple sheet of the tags you've used so a year from now you know what each one meant.

Don't put UTM tags on links between pages of your own site. Google's help page on campaigns and traffic sources says campaign values that arrive in the middle of a visit don't change that visit's source, but they are attached to the events where they appear and used for event-based attribution. An internal tag can then take credit for a form submission that an outside source earned.

4. Ask every new customer how they heard about you

Technology misses things. A neighbor saw your truck, then searched your name on Google and called from your Business Profile. The tracking says Google. The real cause was the truck. Asking catches that.

• Make "How did you hear about us?" a required field in the CRM for every new lead, phone or web.
• On the phone, ask it naturally near the end: "Last thing, how did you find us?"
• On web forms, include it as a dropdown using your source list, optional for the customer but there.
• If they say "Google", ask one follow-up: "Did you search for the service, or for our name?" A name search usually means something else sent them.

Record both answers when they differ: what the tracking shows and what the customer says. The gap is useful information.

5. Report jobs and revenue by source in your CRM

The point of all this is one monthly report. For each source, it should show:

This only works if the lead, quote, job and invoice are linked in one system. If leads live in a notebook, quotes in a spreadsheet and invoices in accounting software, the source gets lost along the way. A custom CRM keeps that link from first contact to payment. For how to read the cost columns, see cost per lead versus cost per job.

What about leads from Angi, Thumbtack and similar platforms?

Those are the easiest to label and the easiest to undercount later. The first job is clearly from the platform. The second, when the customer calls your cell directly, often gets logged as a repeat customer and the platform gets no credit. If they come back through the app instead, the platform may charge you for that lead again. Record the original source on the customer record and a separate source on each new job. Then you can see both the cost of acquiring the customer and how many came back on their own.

Mistakes that quietly ruin the data

• Letting the source default to the first option. If the dropdown starts on "Google", half your leads will say Google. Start it blank and make it required.
• Changing the list every month. Add a source when you start a new channel, but don't rename old ones, or last year's numbers stop lining up with this year's.
• Counting the source of the job instead of the customer. A repeat customer's fifth job is not a new Business Profile lead. Keep the original source on the customer and mark later jobs as repeat work.
• Only the office records sources. When the owner takes a call in the truck, the source gets skipped. Make it a field in the mobile app too.
• Judging a channel on one month. Seasonal trades swing hard. Compare the same month year over year where you can.

A five-step monthly review

1. Pull the jobs-by-source report for last month.
2. Check for leads with no source and fix them while people still remember.
3. Enter each paid channel's spend.
4. Note the two sources with the lowest and highest cost per job.
5. Decide one change: more budget, less budget, faster follow-up, or a better page.

Give each change a few months before you judge it, and compare against the same months last year once you have them. Use our lead cost calculator for channels you can't report on yet, and if you'd like help setting up tracking, our free system quote starts by mapping where your leads come from today.

Frequently asked questions