What should a construction marketing report tell you about enquiries?

Keep a short statement at the top of the report: the service being promoted, the people you want to reach, the area you cover and any practical limits on the work you can accept. Review whether those priorities still apply.

A scaffolding contractor seeking appointments from main contractors has a different brief from a building firm looking for domestic extensions. A practice concentrating on larger residential projects may also need to distinguish those enquiries from small requests outside its scope.

Ask for a dated account of the work completed. Which service page changed? Which project story was published? Where did a campaign send visitors? Record changes in capacity or service coverage too. These details give the results context and make the next review more useful.

If the brief is still vague, use our construction marketing brief guide to agree the starting point.

Search reporting can show whether your business is appearing for relevant searches and whether people follow those results to the website. Ask to see the search terms and landing pages that relate to your priority services, with brand searches identified separately where the data allows.

In Google Search Console, impressions describe appearances in search results, clicks record interactions that lead to your site, and average position summarises where results appeared. Average position is not a fixed ranking that every prospective client sees. Google's explanation of these search measures describes the differences.

For a construction business, the practical questions are straightforward. Are people finding the services you want to promote? Do the pages explain your role and working area? Can visitors find relevant work and a clear way to enquire?

Keep organic search and paid advertising identifiable in the report. Also ask which part of website activity is measured and what may be missing because of the tracking setup or visitors' privacy choices. A reporting gap needs a note, rather than an invented zero.

Ask the person preparing the report to show you how each enquiry measure is collected. A click on a telephone link shows an action on the website. Confirmation that someone spoke to your team comes from the call record. A received form message should be traceable to your inbox or enquiry system.

Google Analytics allows a business to mark a collected event as a key event. The label means that the business considers that action important; its meaning still depends on what the event records. See Google's guide to key events.

Google also documents form interaction events, including form starts and submissions. For your own website, ask how those events have been checked against successful message receipt. A number in an analytics report should have a clear relationship to the action it claims to measure.

Agree a few separate stages for the review:

• Contact action: someone clicked a contact option or started a form.
• Received enquiry: your team received a distinct customer request.
• Suitable enquiry: someone checked it against your agreed services, area and other requirements.
• Discussion or proposal: the enquiry progressed to a recorded next step.
• Won work: the client appointed you, according to your normal business records.

Keep tests, spam, repeat messages about the same job and recruitment enquiries identifiable. A quotation being prepared is useful progress, but the outcome remains open until the customer decides.

The person handling the enquiry often knows something the website report cannot tell you: whether the work fits the business. Agree who records that judgement and what they need to check.

Use criteria that reflect how you actually take on work. These might include the requested service, location, project type, likely timing and the information needed before you can price it. Where a necessary detail is missing, leave the enquiry awaiting assessment and record the next question.

Keep a short reason when an enquiry is unsuitable. Repeated requests for a service you no longer offer might justify clearer website copy. Requests from outside your working area might prompt a review of the page or campaign that attracted them. These are things to investigate, not conclusions to draw from one message.

Use your existing enquiry record if it can hold these details. The person responsible for responding needs to be able to keep it current.

This is an illustrative review exercise, not a Crafters client result.

A contractor's inbox contains eight records for the review period. On checking them, the office identifies one test, one repeat message about an existing enquiry and one job application. That leaves five distinct customer enquiries.

Two of those five are outside the agreed working area. Two fit the current brief and have progressed to a discussion. The remaining enquiry needs more information before the team can assess it. No appointment has been confirmed for these five enquiries at the review date.

The useful account is therefore five customer enquiries: two suitable, two outside the area and one awaiting assessment. The two discussions are a later stage of the same enquiries, so adding them to five would count them twice.

The next actions follow from the detail. The office can obtain the missing project information. The marketing team can check whether the relevant page explains coverage clearly. The director can review what happens to the two suitable discussions. The figures alone do not establish which channel brought each enquiry or whether a campaign caused it.

Check the date range before interpreting a rise or fall. Compare complete periods of the same length, keeping the service, country, device and channel filters consistent where those filters are used. Note holidays, changes in spend, a new website launch or a change in tracking that affects the comparison.

Show the counts as well as percentages. Moving from one suitable enquiry to two is a real difference of one enquiry; it is still a small base for deciding how much marketing to commission.

Also separate enquiries received during the period from work won during it. A contract agreed this month may have started with a conversation months earlier. If you are following a particular group of enquiries through to appointment, keep that group's original enquiry dates and allow unresolved decisions to remain open.

Where the source is known, record the evidence. A customer saying they found you through a recommendation is useful information. A recorded campaign source is another kind of evidence. Keep unknown sources visible and avoid assigning every unexplained enquiry to whichever channel performed best in the report.

Before the meeting ends, write down the next actions, the person responsible and the evidence you will review. That might be checking enquiry delivery, clarifying a service description, gathering a relevant project example or continuing an activity until there is enough information to assess it.

These five questions can keep the discussion focused:

1. What work was completed, and when?
2. What changed for the services and audiences we agreed to prioritise?
3. How many distinct customer enquiries arrived, and how many have been assessed?
4. What remains unknown or makes the comparison difficult?
5. What will we change, keep or investigate before the next review?

Our construction marketing checklist can help turn those decisions into a manageable action plan.

At Crafters, we plan digital marketing for contractors and architects around the work they want to attract. We agree priorities and review relevant activity alongside suitable enquiries. If you need help deciding what your marketing should do next, tell us about your current website, priority services and working area.