A moving company in Jeddah was getting phone calls from their ads.
They could not tell you how many. Or which ad. Or which search. Or what time of day. The phone rang, somebody answered, and that was the end of what anyone knew.
So before I touched their budget, I started counting one thing: people tapping the phone number on their website.
286 of those taps have been counted since.
The number is not the point
286 on its own is a nice number. What it lets you see is the useful part.
- Which searches make the phone ring, and which ones quietly spend money. Searches like "moving company Jeddah" do several times better than the rest of the account.
- What time of day people call, so the money is being spent when they are calling, not at 3am.
- What they are using. Nearly everyone is on a phone, which changes how the page should be built.
- Which ads to stop paying for. This is usually where the savings come from.
None of this is clever. It is the difference between "the phone rang" and "the phone rang because of that."
A word you will hear a lot
People in my industry say tracking, or conversion tracking, and it sounds bigger than it is.
It just means counting the things you care about. A call. A WhatsApp message. A form sent. Somebody buying. The website quietly makes a note each time one happens, so at the end of the month there is a number instead of a feeling.
It does not mean knowing who people are. For most small businesses, it is counting, nothing more.
Count first, advertise second
This is the part people do backwards, and it is expensive.
If the counting starts after the ads have been running a month, that month taught you nothing. You cannot go back later and find out what happened. Those numbers do not exist anywhere.
Done in the right order, every dollar you spend tells you something about the next one. Done backwards, you are paying for a lesson you will never be given.
What counts as a lead
For most service businesses it is not a form on a page. It is:
- a tap on the phone number
- a tap on WhatsApp
- an email
- a form, if you have one
Those are four different things, and plenty of websites count none of them. If you run ads and cannot say which of the four brought you last month's customers, you are not buying customers. You are buying clicks and hoping.
Setting this up is usually an afternoon of work. It is the cheapest thing you will ever do to an advertising account.