apna.live
A website is either bringing you customers or it is a page nobody sees. Most owners genuinely do not know which, because the number they are shown — visitors — does not answer the question.
Here are the four numbers that do.
1. Enquiries, and where they came from
The only number that really matters, and almost nobody tracks it.
Keep a sheet. Paper is fine.
| Date | Name | How they found us | What they wanted | Converted? |
The "how they found us" column is the important one, and you get it by asking. "Just so I know — how did you come across us?" Most customers answer happily.
After a month you will know whether the website, the Google listing, a directory, a walk-past or a referral is producing your business. That is a more useful piece of information than any analytics dashboard.
A tip: you can separate website enquiries automatically by making the website's WhatsApp button open a message with a specific first line — "Hi, I saw your website…" — so you can tell them apart in your chat list without asking.
2. Calls and direction requests from your Google listing
Free, already collected, and hardly anyone looks at it.
Your Google Business Profile shows you, for the last month:
- How many people saw your listing
- How many searched for you by name versus found you by category
- How many called from the listing
- How many asked for directions
- How many clicked through to your website
Calls and directions are as close to real intent as a free metric gets. Someone who taps "directions" is coming to you.
Write the numbers down monthly. The trend matters far more than any single month.
The name-versus-category split is worth watching. If almost everyone is searching your name, you are only being found by people who already know you, and your discovery is not working. If a good share is finding you by category — "salon near me" — you are being discovered, which is what you want to grow.
3. Whether people can reach you
Not a website metric, but it decides the value of everything else.
For two weeks count: missed calls during business hours, and WhatsApp messages that waited more than two hours for a reply.
Multiply by what one enquiry is worth to you. The number will be uncomfortable.
This is the cheapest thing to fix on the entire list, and usually the largest single leak.
4. Your review count, month on month
Reviews are both a ranking signal and a conversion signal, so this number predicts the others.
One number, once a month, written down. If it is not moving, nobody is asking, and that is a five-minute fix — a QR at the counter and a sentence to say.
What about visitor counts?
Visitor numbers are the number most people are shown and the least useful for a local business.
Reasons to be sceptical:
A large share of web traffic is not human. Search engine crawlers, monitoring services, scrapers and bots visit constantly. Basic counters do not always filter them out. A "hundred visitors" can be almost entirely automated.
Visitors are not enquiries. Two hundred visitors and no phone calls is worse than eleven visitors and three calls.
Percentages on small numbers are meaningless. "100% mobile" out of two visitors tells you nothing.
If you do look at visitor data, look at it monthly rather than daily, watch the direction rather than the value, and treat any number under a few hundred a month as too small to draw conclusions from.
What good looks like
For a typical local business, six months after doing this properly:
- The Google listing shows more people finding you by category than by name, and that share is growing.
- Calls and direction requests from the listing rise month on month.
- Review count grows by eight to fifteen a month.
- Some meaningful share of new customers, when asked, say they found you online.
- Missed calls and slow WhatsApp replies are close to zero.
If those are true, it is working, whatever the visitor count says.
What to do if it is not working
Diagnose in this order, because each depends on the one before it.
Nobody is finding you. The problem is the listing, not the website. Check your primary category, complete every field, add photographs, get reviews moving.
People find you but do not click through or call. The problem is your rating, your main photograph, or your hours. Look at what they see at the moment of deciding.
People visit the website but do not enquire. The problem is the first screen. Is it obvious what you do, where you are, and how to contact you within one second? Are prices visible? Is there a Call button without scrolling?
People enquire but do not become customers. The problem is response time, or the price conversation. Both are operational, not digital.
Work them in that order. Fixing the fourth while the first is broken achieves nothing.
Apna.live dashboards show your visits and enquiries alongside your Google listing data. See yours.
Run a local business?
See your own website first. Pay only if you like it, from ₹149/month.