Their agency told them it was the economy

Read time: 4 mins

Morning — here's this week:

— A business losing seven figures of enquiries without knowing it

— Why nobody ever complains about a broken form

— One thing worth doing before Friday

I went to see a business recently. Not a customer — they'd asked me to come and look at something.

They're a decent size. Turnover around £50 million. They've been with the same marketing agency for years, since back when they were a fraction of that, and on the face of it everything looked fine.

Except the enquiries had stopped.

Now, in their world, an average order is roughly a million pounds. So they don't need volume. Two to five enquiries a month is a good month. That's the business.

It had dropped to nought or one.

They'd raised it with their agency more than once. And the answer that came back, each time, was that it was the economy. The market was quiet. Things were tough out there.

Which might have been true. It's just that nobody had checked anything else.

So we ran what we always run — an audit of the website, and a check on how the business shows up in AI results, ChatGPT and the rest.

And the reason turned up in about twenty minutes.

The enquiry forms on their website weren't working. Fill one in, press send, and it went nowhere. And the click-to-call on the phone number — the thing every mobile visitor taps instead of writing the number down — wasn't working either.

The traffic was unchanged. The rankings were unchanged. The website looked exactly the same as it always had.

It just had no way of getting hold of anybody.

Needless to say, we picked up a new customer!

This is the one I'd most like every person reading this to take seriously, because it is the quietest and most expensive failure there is.

Here's why it goes unnoticed for months.

A broken form doesn't break loudly. It doesn't throw an error. It usually says “Thanks, we'll be in touch” and then does nothing. The visitor goes away perfectly happy, assuming you'll ring them.

And nobody complains. The people who would complain are the ones you never heard from.

So there's no alarm. No angry email. Nothing in your inbox that looks wrong — because the problem is the empty inbox, and an empty inbox looks exactly like a quiet month.

Then it compounds. You've got no evidence, so you reach for an explanation. The market's slow. It's the time of year. Customers are holding off. Every one of those is plausible, and crucially, none of them can be checked — which is precisely why they're the ones people land on.

An explanation nobody can test is usually a sign that nobody's measuring.

I want to be fair to the agency here, because this is less about them than it looks.

They weren't lying. As far as they could see, everything was fine — the traffic was steady, the rankings held, the reports said what they'd always said. The one number that would have shown the problem wasn't on the report, because it wasn't being measured.

And that could happen to anyone. It could happen to us, if we didn't check. Which is the only reason we do.

Here's what's underneath it.

Traffic, rankings, impressions, positions, visits. None of those are the thing you actually want. They're the nearest thing to it that's easy to count.

And most of the time they move together, so you stop noticing the difference. Visits go up, enquiries go up. Everyone's happy.

Then one day they come apart. The visits sit exactly where they always have, the enquiries fall off a cliff, and not one line on the report says a word about it.

The only number that can't quietly mislead you is the one you wanted in the first place: did an enquiry arrive, and did somebody speak to them?

Measure that, and a broken form turns up within a fortnight. Measure everything around it instead, and it turns up when somebody finally sits down and asks an awkward question — which in this case was well over a year.

Ten minutes. Do it before Friday. Do it properly.

Go to your own website. Not the admin, not a preview — the live site, on your phone, on mobile data, like a customer would.

Most people will find it works. Good — now you know, rather than assume.

Some of you will find it doesn't. And if you do, think about how long it's been like that, and what was happening in your business over that period.

And if you want the faster version: we've built a free tool that checks whether visitors can actually find the next step on your site — contact links, enquiry routes, the paths people take. No email needed; you just put your website in and read what comes back.

→ mot.bamsh.co.uk

One thing it deliberately doesn't do is tell you whether enquiries reach your team. Nothing can do that from the outside. That bit is the five-step test above, and it's the one that matters most.

This week's prompt: map every way a customer could try to contact you, and find the ones nobody's checked.

P.S. Whenever it's useful, three ways I can help:

— Can visitors actually reach you? Two minutes, no email needed, and nothing gets sent or changed. Put your website in and read what comes back. → mot.bamsh.co.uk

— Watch: what AI search means for your business. 12 minutes on where your next enquiries are actually going to come from.

— Stuck with your marketing? Book a 15-minute call, and we'll diagnose the problem and the opportunities.