Updated quarterly · Last refreshed 13 July 2026
Where leads really come from
Real attribution data from 9 Australian 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.
This is an early-access dataset — 1,145 leads over about 11 weeks, all from sites managed by one Australian agency. See the methodology before you cite anything. We publish this quarterly, and it broadens as more businesses come onto the platform.
of leads across our tracked sites came from a channel the business wasn't paying for — organic search, direct, or referral traffic. The other 46% came through paid ads.
Where the leads actually come from
This is the split across every recorded lead in our dataset, by the channel that drove it.
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 our tracked sites.
Median organic-to-paid lead ratio, among sites running both SEO and Google Ads at once.
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 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. That stands in contrast to the multi-touch B2B sales cycles most lead-gen content is written about — the small-business service reality looks a lot shorter.
When leads actually arrive
Leads by hour of day (AEST)
| 12am | 18 leads |
| 1am | 8 leads |
| 2am | 11 leads |
| 3am | 7 leads |
| 4am | 6 leads |
| 5am | 9 leads |
| 6am | 22 leads |
| 7am | 31 leads |
| 8am | 31 leads |
| 9am | 72 leads |
| 10am | 77 leads |
| 11am | 91 leads |
| 12pm | 96 leads |
| 1pm | 87 leads |
| 2pm | 90 leads |
| 3pm | 113 leads |
| 4pm | 62 leads |
| 5pm | 43 leads |
| 6pm | 91 leads |
| 7pm | 55 leads |
| 8pm | 41 leads |
| 9pm | 35 leads |
| 10pm | 20 leads |
| 11pm | 29 leads |
Leads by day of week
Monday is the busiest day in our dataset (20% of weekly leads); Sunday the quietest (7%).
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. 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 calls, not just forms
Most attribution tooling is built around form submissions. Across our tracked sites, phone clicks make up the majority of recorded leads.
84% 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. Phone-click share also swings hard by trade:
Share of leads that were phone clicks rather than form submissions, by trade, among sites in our dataset.
Ruler Analytics' 2021 survey of marketers found 62% who use phone numbers to drive leads struggled to track inbound calls back to a channel. For an emergency plumber where 98% of leads are phone clicks, that's not a rounding error — it's most of the business's marketing data.
Why attribution stays broken
- 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).
- 53.3% say a limited understanding of attribution 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 are recorded as Direct, with no referrer and no UTM data — even with tracking installed. That figure is 100% for a business with no lead-source tracking at all.
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. 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.
The Australian context
- Australian internet advertising revenue reached AU$18.4 billion in 2025, up 11.5% year on year (IAB Australia / PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report, published March 2026).
- Digital now accounts for roughly three-quarters of total Australian advertising spend (Meltwater / We Are Social, Digital 2026: Australia).
- Google holds around 88% of the Australian search engine market as of June 2026, down from roughly 94% in 2024, as Bing gains share via Copilot and Edge defaults (StatCounter Global Stats).
Australian small businesses are spending more on digital marketing than ever. The data above is an early look at what that spend actually produces at the enquiry level — we'll keep building it out as more businesses come onto the platform.
Methodology
The first-party statistics on this page are drawn from 9 Australian small-business websites tracked with Lead Recorder, covering 1,145 recorded leads between 29 April and 13 July 2026 (about 11 weeks). All 9 sites are currently managed through a single Australian digital marketing agency using Lead Recorder on behalf of its clients — this is an early-access cohort, not a survey of Lead Recorder's full customer base, and readers should weigh that when generalising. We'll broaden the dataset as more independent accounts reach meaningful lead volume.
The dataset skews toward trades and home-service businesses (plumbing, electrical, painting, cleaning, blinds and window furnishings, and locksmith services) that actively invest in Google Ads and SEO, plus one marketing agency's own website. It does not currently include a search-term attribution section — Google Ads keyword resolution requires a connected Google Ads account, which none of the sites in this cohort have set up yet. We plan to add that section once real search-term data exists.
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 13 July 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 — we reply within a few hours.
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