In July we put enquiries next to the traffic — call clicks, email clicks, contact forms, purchases. The number that proves your worth.
Then comes the obvious follow-up, and sooner or later every agency gets it. Thirty-eight enquiries, lovely. Where are they coming from?
And the honest answer, most of the time, is a guess. You have a hunch it’s the blog post from the spring. A hunch is a terrible thing to bill against.
So Conversions has its own page now, and it answers that question properly.
Day by day
The month’s total is a fact. The month’s shape is a story.
Thirty-eight enquiries across March tells you very little. Thirty-eight enquiries with eleven of them on the Tuesday the newsletter went out tells you what the newsletter is worth. Six quiet days in a row in the middle of the month tells you something else, and usually something you want to know quickly.
That’s the chart at the top of the page: every day of the period, each day stacked by event type, so you can see which kind of enquiry moved and when.
The case it earns its keep on is a form that quietly stops working. A monthly total shows a slightly disappointing month and you shrug. The daily view shows a cliff, on a date you can go and check.
Where they arrived, and where they enquired
Underneath, two lists side by side. They look similar and they are not, and the difference is the whole feature.
Where they arrived is the page that first brought someone who went on to enquire. This is the page doing the work: the blog post, the service page, the case study that pulled a stranger in off a search result.
Where they enquired is the page the enquiry was actually sent from. More often than not this is /contact, and on its own it’s the least surprising list in the product.
Put them together and you get the thing worth knowing. The contact page collects the enquiry. Something else earned it. Without both lists you end up crediting /contact for the entire pipeline, which is a bit like thanking the till for the sale.
One honest note about the numbers, because they will not tally and I’d rather you heard it from me: they aren’t measuring the same thing. Arrivals count visitors who went on to enquire; enquiries count the enquiries themselves. One person can send two. Both lists say which unit they’re counted in, right there under the list.
The email now takes them there
Here’s the part I was slower to see than I should have been.
We built a good dashboard. Clients weren’t opening it. Not because they disliked it — because nothing ever told them to. The report landed in their inbox each month, they read it, and that was the transaction. The dashboard sat there being excellent and unvisited.
The email is the thing they actually open. So the email is now the door.
Every section heading in the monthly report — Traffic, Conversions, Audience, Organic search, Uptime, Site health — links straight to that page on the dashboard. Under each one sits a short line saying what’s through the link, and where it can, it names something real rather than waving vaguely:
- Organic search — “emergency electrician oxford” brought the most clicks.
- Conversions — Broken down by day, and by the pages that brought them.
- Uptime — Day by day, with response times, on the dashboard.
A client who wants the summary reads the email as before and never clicks a thing. A client who wants the detail is one tap away from it, at the moment they’re curious, which is the only moment that counts.
If a site has no dashboard, the headings render exactly as they always did. Nothing to configure.
Keep your tooling to yourself, if you’d rather
A smaller one, but it’s come up more than once.
The reports and the dashboard have always named their sources — via Plausible, via Search Console, via MainWP. Some agencies like that. Others would rather not hand a client a shopping list of the stack they’re paying you to operate.
There’s now a switch for it in Organisation settings, Name the data sources. Turn it off and the labels disappear from both the report and the dashboard. The numbers are identical either way.
I’ve left mine on. “Via Search Console” is a quiet little proof that the figures aren’t ours to invent, and I’d rather a client saw that. But it was never my call to make on your behalf, which is rather the point of a switch.
And it had to work on a phone
Obvious in hindsight: put links in an email and people follow them on a phone.
So the dashboard got a proper going-over on mobile this week. The navigation moved into a drawer instead of a row of tabs that cut off mid-word. The header carries the site’s name and the period you’re looking at, and taps back to the overview. Long URLs stay inside their cards instead of shoving the page sideways.
None of that is exciting. All of it is the difference between a client following a link and a client giving up.
The honest bit
The daily chart and both page lists read Plausible’s event and session data, so for now they need Plausible-based analytics. GA4 sites keep the conversion totals they already have in the report and the dashboard; they just don’t get the day-by-day or the two lists yet.
That’s the same caveat as when enquiries first shipped, and I’d rather repeat it than let you find out on a client call.
The contact page will always get the credit. Now you can see which page did the work.
