See which marketing actually brings customers

The problem

Most small businesses market on several fronts at once: some search visibility, some social, a newsletter, word of mouth. Customers arrive. Which activity produced them is unknown, so next quarter’s effort goes wherever it went last quarter, or wherever felt busiest.

The usual response is to install analytics, look at a traffic chart, and be no wiser. Visits are not customers. A channel can send a lot of traffic that never buys and a little that always does, and a visitor count cannot tell you which is which.

There is also a measurement trap. Attribution is genuinely hard: people see a post, search your name a week later, and arrive through search. Naive tracking credits search for a customer that social created.

What AI can actually do here

Honestly, this category is mostly measurement discipline rather than intelligence, and treating it as a tooling problem is why it stays unsolved.

The step that changes decisions is connecting a visit to an outcome, which means defining the outcome. A goal that means something, such as a booking or an enquiry, rather than a pageview. Funnels then show where people drop out, which is more actionable than any traffic number.

Combining sources is the other half. Web analytics knows about visits, your CRM or invoicing knows about revenue, and the useful question lives across both. Bringing them into one place is where a query tool earns its cost.

Search visibility tools tell you something different again: what people search for, whether you appear, and increasingly whether AI assistants mention you. That is demand-side information rather than performance data.

The simplest honest method costs nothing: ask every new customer how they found you and write the answer down. It is imperfect and it beats untracked instinct.

How the tools differ

Plausible Analytics is lightweight, privacy-focused web analytics. No free plan, 30-day trial without a credit card. Starter is $9 per month for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews, Growth $14 with up to 3 sites and team management, Business $19 with up to 10 sites, 5-year retention, API access and funnels. Price scales with pageview allowance. Its privacy design also tends to simplify the consent question, which is a real secondary benefit.

Metabase is where the joining happens, once you want revenue and traffic in the same view. Open Source is free with unlimited users; Starter $100 per month or $1,080 per year including 5 users then $6 per user; Pro $575 per month.

Semrush answers the demand question rather than the performance one. Free gives 1 demo project and 10 daily reports with basic AI visibility. SEO is $117.33 per month billed annually with 5 websites and 500 keywords, Starter $165.17 adding AI visibility for 50 prompts daily. That is a serious budget line, so buy it when search is a channel you are actively working rather than to satisfy curiosity.

When you don't need a tool

If all your customers come from referrals, measure referrals by asking. Analytics on a site nobody finds through search tells you nothing worth acting on.

If you have one channel, you already know the answer. Attribution matters when you are choosing between things.

And if the underlying question is whether anyone can find you at all, start at get found on Google and in AI answers.