How to track leads from your website and see where they came from
No single tool tells a small business exactly which post, search or referral produced each enquiry. You can get close with three records kept side by side: visits by source from your site's analytics, every form submission copied into a sheet, and a short weekly tally where you join them and ask customers what they remember.
Three records, three questions
- Visits by source
- Where are people arriving from? Anticode's dashboard counts page views per site per day, split by source: search engines, AI assistants, social sites, other websites and direct visits. It uses no cookies and stores nothing about the visitor, and it counts AI and search crawlers separately so they don't inflate the numbers.
- Submissions
- Who actually got in touch, and when? Every contact, booking and newsletter form is saved in the project, and a Google Sheets or Airtable connector copies each one into a table you control.
- The weekly tally
- Which sources turned into paying work? Only you can answer this, by joining the first two and adding what the customer told you.
The gap between the first two is the honest limit of any small-site setup: analytics counts visits, not people, so it can't say that this particular enquiry came from that particular Instagram post. Treat source data as a trend and the customer's own answer as the detail.
Set up the lead tracking spreadsheet
- Connect Google Sheets or Airtable in Connectors. Sheets works through a short Apps Script web app you paste into your own Google account. For Airtable, create the table first with the columns Anticode writes to: Site, Form, Submitted and Details.
- Add your own columns to the right: Source (what the customer said), Outcome (won, lost, no reply, spam), Value, and Notes.
- Send a test enquiry from the published site and check that a row arrives within a minute.
- Freeze the header row and add a filter, so you can sort by month and source.
Connectors are set per account or Team workspace, so if you run several sites, all their submissions land in the same table with the site's name in its own column. That's useful: one sheet answers "which site brings the most enquiries" as well.
Capturing the source from the customer
The built-in contact form asks for a name, an email and a message, nothing more. There are two ways to learn how someone found you:
- Ask in your first reply. One line at the end: "Out of interest, how did you find us?" Most people answer, and it costs nothing.
- Use a custom form. A form tied to a site function can carry up to 30 plain-text fields, so a "How did you hear about us?" field arrives with the submission. It takes more setup; see site functions.
The weekly tally
| Look at | Where | Write down |
|---|---|---|
| Views by source this week | The site's analytics in the dashboard | The top three sources and any sudden change |
| New rows this week | Your sheet or Airtable | Total enquiries, and the Source column filled in for each |
| Outcomes from earlier weeks | Your sheet | Which leads became work, and their value |
| Anything odd | Both | A spike in views with no enquiries, or the reverse |
After a month, the pattern usually shows. Perhaps search brings most visits but referrals from a partner bring the jobs worth having. That's the answer to "where do my website leads come from", and it's what decides where the next hour of marketing goes.
Separating campaigns
Analytics in Anticode counts views per site, not per page. If you need to measure one campaign on its own, give it its own small site (a landing page on its own address) so its views and submissions are counted separately, and its rows carry its own site name in your sheet. See campaign landing pages.
What can go wrong
- Rows missing from the sheet. Each submission is sent to a connector once, without retries. Compare the sheet with the project's saved submissions now and then.
- Every lead says "Google". People often say Google when they searched your name after hearing about you elsewhere. Ask a follow-up question when the answer matters.
- The sheet grows columns nobody fills. Keep five. Delete the rest.
What Anticode doesn't do here
There's no per-page analytics, no link between a visit and a submission, no campaign or conversion reports, and no third-party analytics built in. Anticode won't fill in outcomes or values for you. The tracking that matters most is the column you keep yourself. For acting on each lead quickly, see following up on website leads.
Questions people ask
Can I see which page a lead came from?
Not from Anticode's analytics, which counts views per site. Each submission records the site and the form it came through.
Do I need a CRM to track leads from my website?
Not at first. A sheet with five columns does the job for a few dozen leads a month. Move to a CRM such as HubSpot when several people work the same leads.
Does the analytics count bots?
AI and search crawlers are counted separately from human visits, and other bots aren't counted.