Measuring a funnel with no website analytics at all

4 days ago
3 min read

Introduction

A large number of small businesses have no working analytics. The tracking code was never installed, or it was installed and then broken by a redesign, or the account belongs to an agency nobody has spoken to since

This is treated as a blocking problem and it is not one.

The important funnel measurements happen after somebody makes contact, and none of them come from a website. Enquiries, quotes, wins, values and elapsed times all live in your phone, your inbox, your calendar and your accounts. Businesses with no website at all can measure a funnel perfectly well.

Analytics adds one thing — a view of what happens before contact — and there are workable substitutes for most of it.

1. Measuring a funnel with no website analytics starts at first contact

The reframing.

Everything from the enquiry onward is countable without any web tooling. That is four of the five numbers most businesses need. The website only affects the fifth. Start there and the missing tooling stops mattering.

2. Ask how people found you

The substitute for referrer data.

One question on every first contact replaces most of what analytics would have told you, and covers offline sources it never could. Record the answer verbatim. Consistency matters more than categories. Tidy the wording into groups once a quarter.

3. Use your phone and inbox as the record

The existing data.

Call logs, message timestamps and sent mail give you volumes and elapsed times without any new system. Most of a funnel history already exists there. It only needs transcribing into rows. An hour recovers several months.

4. Use your calendar for the middle

The timing source.

Site visits, meetings and calls are already dated, and the gaps between them are your stage timings. This is usually the richest untapped source in a small business. Nobody thinks to look at it.

5. Use invoices for value and outcome

The end of the funnel.

Your accounting records already contain what was won, when and for how much. Matching them back to enquiries is the only work involved. Do it monthly while it is easy.

6. Use a distinct number or address per channel

The cheap tracking trick.

A separate phone number on a printed advert, or a dedicated address on a listing, attributes contacts without any software. It is old, crude and reliable. It also works offline.

7. Ask about the website directly

The qualitative substitute.

Whether people looked at the site before calling, and what they were trying to find, is answerable in one question on the call. Ten answers tell you more than a month of session data. It is also more actionable.

8. Watch searches for your own name

The one external signal worth having.

Free tools show whether the volume of people looking you up is rising or falling, which is a genuine leading indicator. It requires no site changes. Check it quarterly.

9. Install analytics eventually, but do not wait

The sequencing.

It is worth having and it is not the constraint. Start counting today with what exists, and add the web data when someone has time. The habit matters more than the tooling.

Be careful about assuming analytics would have answered your question. Most of what small businesses want to know — why enquiries stalled, which channel produces the good customers — is not visible in session data even when it is working perfectly.

Conclusion

Start the count at first contact and use the records you already keep.

Ask every caller how they found you, take volumes and timings from your phone log, inbox and calendar, take values and outcomes from your invoices, use a distinct number or address to attribute printed and listed sources, ask people directly what they were looking for on the site, watch the volume of searches for your own name, and add analytics later without waiting for it to begin.