Updated quarterly · Last refreshed 7 September 2026 · Next refresh due December 2026
Where leads really come from
Real attribution data from 26 small-business websites tracked with Lead Recorder: not a survey, actual browser and call tracking. Plus the external research, checked against its original source and correctly cited.
3,146 leads over about 18 weeks, from 26 sites: 10 still managed by the original agency, 16 independent accounts that have joined since. See the methodology before you cite anything, and see the correction below before you cite last quarter's numbers.
Correction, posted 7 September 2026
We published 52.7% phone taps as a majority finding in July. The majority has now flipped to forms.
Our first release said phone taps made up the majority of recorded leads. Across the current, larger sample, forms are the majority instead: 48.2% form submissions to 44.3% phone taps.
The tracked cohort has broadened a lot since July: from 9 sites, all trades and home-services managed by one agency, to 26 sites including SaaS, agency, e-commerce, healthcare, and immigration-advisory businesses. Form-led businesses joined the dataset, and the average moved toward forms. We checked this against the original 9 real client sites on their own, over the same extended window: phone taps there are still running above 50%, so the finding didn't reverse for those businesses, the mix of businesses changed.
This refresh also tightened how we exclude internal and test accounts from the tracked sample, which the methodology below now states in full. That's a smaller factor than the cohort growth above, but worth being upfront about.
The claim that survives, and we think it was always the better one: phone share is driven by trade, not by an average. 97.1% for plumbing and 18% for painting is a more useful thing to tell a business owner than any single headline percentage. See the by-trade breakdown further down this page, and the full write-up of this correction on our blog.
of leads across our tracked sites came from a channel the business wasn't paying per click for: organic search, direct, or referral traffic. The other 32.1% came through paid ads, down from 46% in July as the cohort broadened.
Where the leads actually come from
This is the split across every recorded lead in our dataset, by the channel that drove it.
"Direct" here (25.9%) is the residual bucket after checking every signal, including paid-ad click IDs: no referrer, no UTM, no click ID match. Further down this page we also quote a stricter 24.1% Direct figure that checks only referrer and UTM data. The two numbers measure slightly different things and both are correct; see the direct traffic section for why they're not the same.
For context on the demand side: Australians say they discover new brands mostly through search engines (37.7%) and social media ads (31.3%) (Meltwater / We Are Social, Digital 2026: Australia). But discovery isn't enquiry: our data shows what actually converts into a recorded lead, which is the number a business owner should be budgeting against, not the number a brand survey reports.
Median leads per site, per month, across all 26 tracked sites. The range is wide (0.8 to 540.4) because one immigration-advisory site runs far ahead of the rest, so treat the range as a fact about this cohort, not a typical business's expectation.
Accounts with a connected Google Ads integration. Not yet enough to publish a search-term-level keyword section; see the methodology.
The lead journey: how long it actually takes
GA4 tells you a session happened. It doesn't tell you how many pages someone read or how long they took to decide before they called or filled out a form. Here's what that looks like across our tracked leads.
Median pages viewed before enquiring
Median time from landing to enquiry
Converted on their first visit, not a return trip
Most leads in our dataset still decide fast: for a local trade or service business, a visitor who lands on the right page tends to call or submit a form within minutes, on that same visit, rather than browsing multiple pages or coming back later. All three of these numbers moved slightly in the same direction since July (more pages, a little more time, a few points fewer first-visit conversions), which tracks with a broader cohort that now includes businesses with a longer consideration cycle than an emergency plumber. It's a smaller shift than the phone-versus-form one, and worth watching rather than acting on yet.
We broke this down further (the full distribution of visits, pages, and time to enquiry, plus how it splits between phone and form leads) on a dedicated page: how many times people visit a website before they enquire.
When leads actually arrive
This section is restricted to the 15 Australian-majority sites in our cohort (1,968 of 3,146 leads). The full cohort's hourly chart is skewed by real international traffic, mostly a single US-immigration-advisory business getting global daytime visits at any AEST hour, which would misrepresent an "AEST" chart as local-business timing. See the methodology for the full explanation.
This is close to the original 45% figure, though the definitions aren't identical (8am to 6pm then, 9am to 5pm now).
Leads by hour of day (AEST, Australian-majority sites)
| 12am | 16 leads |
| 1am | 9 leads |
| 2am | 11 leads |
| 3am | 19 leads |
| 4am | 3 leads |
| 5am | 16 leads |
| 6am | 23 leads |
| 7am | 38 leads |
| 8am | 66 leads |
| 9am | 135 leads |
| 10am | 185 leads |
| 11am | 191 leads |
| 12pm | 185 leads |
| 1pm | 157 leads |
| 2pm | 166 leads |
| 3pm | 185 leads |
| 4pm | 116 leads |
| 5pm | 76 leads |
| 6pm | 116 leads |
| 7pm | 88 leads |
| 8pm | 63 leads |
| 9pm | 61 leads |
| 10pm | 26 leads |
| 11pm | 17 leads |
Leads by day of week (Australian-majority sites)
Tuesday is the busiest day in our dataset (19% of weekly leads), with Monday close behind (18%); Sunday is the quietest (7%). The weekday spread is much flatter than in July, when Monday was a clear leader: weekdays are now roughly even and the weekend is quiet, which is less of a story but is what the data says.
Nearly half of the leads in our dataset arrive when nobody's at the desk to answer them. Separate research on response speed backs up why that matters: a 2007 study by InsideSales.com and MIT Sloan's Dr James Oldroyd found that contacting a lead within 5 minutes rather than 30 makes a business roughly 100x more likely to actually reach them, and 21x more likely to qualify them. Worth being precise about what that study is: a vendor study co-authored with an MIT Sloan faculty fellow, not peer-reviewed, and it measured contact and qualification rates, not sales or close rates, so treat any version of it extended to closing a sale as going beyond what it actually found. A later Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies (Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, 2011) found the average company took 42 hours to respond, and 23% never responded at all. A 2014 industry audit by InsideSales.com/XANT of over 14,000 companies found response times had gotten worse, not better, averaging 61 hours, with 47% of leads never getting a response. The businesses that win aren't necessarily the fastest; they're the ones that know a lead arrived at all.
Phone or form? It depends which trade you're in
Most attribution tooling is built around form submissions, and treats phone clicks as an afterthought. Averaged across our whole tracked cohort, that gap has narrowed since July (see the correction above), and it was never the useful number anyway. What matters for a given business is its own trade, and that swings hard:
Share of leads that were phone clicks rather than form submissions, by trade, with the lead count and site count shown for each. Most of these are a single site, so treat them as directional, not a robust trade average. ballastpoint.com.au and ecco.com.au, both in the original cohort, aren't shown here yet pending trade confirmation.
For an emergency plumber where 97.1% of leads are phone clicks, tooling built only for forms is missing most of the business's marketing data. Ruler Analytics' 2021 survey of marketers found 62% who use phone numbers to drive leads struggled to track inbound calls back to a channel, a vendor survey of around 200 respondents describing that difficulty, not a claim that phone leads convert better than forms.
Across the full tracked cohort, the overall split is now:
83.1% of phone-click leads happened on a mobile device: someone searching on their phone and tapping straight through to a call, with no form in between. That figure barely moved from July.
Why attribution stays broken
All four of these are vendor-run surveys of marketers, not independent or peer-reviewed research; they describe how marketers rate their own attribution problems, not a measurement of outcomes. We're including them because they're accurately cited and directionally consistent with our own data, not because a vendor survey settles the question.
- 40% of marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is one of their top challenges (HubSpot, State of Inbound, 2017).
- 62% of marketers using phone numbers to drive leads say they struggle to track inbound calls back to a source (Ruler Analytics, 2021, roughly 200 respondents).
- 53.3% say a limited understanding of attribution, not specific to phone leads, is their biggest attribution challenge (Ruler Analytics, 2021).
- 70% of businesses struggle to act on the attribution insights they already have (Econsultancy “The State of Marketing Attribution 2017,” with AdRoll; 987 practitioners surveyed).
of leads in our dataset have no referrer and no UTM data, even with tracking installed, up from 19% in July. This is the stricter of the two Direct figures on this page: it doesn't also check for a paid-ad click ID the way the 25.9% channel-split figure above does, which is why the two numbers differ. That figure is 100% for a business with no lead-source tracking at all. Rising Direct as the cohort broadens is itself worth a beat: more businesses means more of the untracked, word-of-mouth, and app-referral traffic that no attribution tool sees, which is the gap this product exists to shrink, not evidence against it.
Stats we checked and couldn't verify
Building this page meant fact-checking every external claim against its original source. A few of the most commonly repeated lead-gen stats didn't hold up, so we left them out rather than repeat them.
"78% of customers buy from whichever company responds to their enquiry first"
We couldn't find this figure in any study, survey, or report, including the blog posts that cite it. A near-identical real-estate version, attributed to the National Association of Realtors, isn't in their report either. As of this refresh, it's increasingly being attributed by name to the real 2007 InsideSales.com/MIT Sloan study we cite above, which does exist but doesn't contain this figure or any close-ratio finding at all: it measured contact and qualification odds only. A fabricated stat has acquired a real source. We're not repeating it.
"Average B2B lead response time is 47 hours"
Widely repeated, but untraceable to a real study. It looks like a mash-up of a 2014 InsideSales.com/XANT finding that 47% of leads never got a response, with an unrelated hours figure. We've used the real 2014 numbers instead (see below).
"It takes 6 to 8 marketing touches to generate a viable sales lead" (commonly attributed to Salesforce)
Salesforce did publish this line in a 2015 blog post, but the source it links to for support actually says 7 to 13+ touches, and neither post cites underlying data. We've left it off this page.
Methodology
The first-party statistics on this page are drawn from 26 small-business websites tracked with Lead Recorder that recorded at least one lead, out of 46 real accounts, covering 3,146 recorded leads between 1 May and 6 September 2026 (about 18 weeks). 10 of the 26 sites are still managed through the original Australian digital marketing agency; the other 16 are independent accounts that have joined since. This is an early-access cohort, not a survey of Lead Recorder's full customer base, and readers should weigh that when generalising.
Exclusion rule: we remove Lead Recorder's own internal and demo accounts, any site on a *.myshopify.com sandbox domain, any account owned by a "hello+" test address, and Lead Recorder's, the agency's, and the founder's own websites (leadrecorder.com, seogrowth.com.au, tomgalland.com), then report only sites with at least one recorded lead. This exclusion rule is tighter than the one used for the July release, which is one of the factors behind this quarter's updated figures. It's now published in full so it can be checked against future refreshes.
The dataset now spans trades and home-service businesses (plumbing, electrical, painting, cleaning, blinds and window furnishings, and locksmith services) alongside SaaS, agency, e-commerce, healthcare, and immigration-advisory businesses. Site country isn't a stored field; where shown, it's derived as the most common country among a site's own leads. 15 of the 26 sites are Australian-majority, with a long tail across the US, GB, CA, DK, SE, NZ, NG, KE, and IN. We don't currently have a verified industry/vertical field for the newer sites, so the phone-share-by-trade table above covers only the 6 trades with a confidently identified site.
9 of 46 accounts have a connected Google Ads account, but only 5 of those have enough resolved search-term data to publish (399 resolved search terms, 82% from a single site), so the search-term attribution section is still deferred rather than built on data that thin.
All data is anonymised and aggregated; no individual business, lead, or contact is identifiable anywhere on this page. External statistics are attributed to their original study, author, and year, and were independently checked before publishing. This page is updated quarterly; figures were last refreshed 7 September 2026, with the next refresh due December 2026.
Want to use these statistics?
You're welcome to cite any figure on this page with attribution and a link: Source: Lead Recorder Lead Source Statistics, 2026, leadrecorder.com/stats. For comment or a custom data cut, email hello@leadrecorder.com and we reply within a few hours.
Download the underlying numbers (CSV) → Every figure on this page, licensed CC BY 4.0.
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