Your Telecom Website Has Been Counting for Years. Has Anyone Looked?
66.1% of telecom sites run analytics, 9 of 47 and the strongest showing this trade has on anything I check. So why does every owner tell me the numbers never sold him a thing?
“I don’t need a dashboard. I know where my work comes from. The phone rings.”
He’s been pulling telecom cable through office ceilings since before I owned a laptop, and he said that to me on a call I had asked him for, in the tone of a man being sold something.
I didn’t argue. He isn’t wrong, and I’ve heard some version of that line from nearly every telecom owner I’ve ever quoted.
So he gets his whole argument first. Then I’ll take it apart.
He’s right about the dashboard
A chart has never sold anything to anyone.
I’ve sat beside owners while one loaded, and I can tell you what their face does. Nothing. A green line goes up, a green line goes down, and a man with three installs booked for the morning has already gone back to his phone.
The people who sell those dashboards earned that shrug, because they’ll talk about sessions and engagement to a guy whose biggest customer is on hold with a carrier right now, furious about a line that dropped at nine.
A report nobody asked for is one more email.
He pays for enough of those.
The version he lives with is worse than the one I’ve described, because the login belongs to whoever built the site, the monthly report arrives at an address nobody checks, and the only person who ever understood any of it left the business years ago.
His site was counting while we talked
That’s the part he didn’t know, and it’s the reason I kept him on the phone another ten minutes.
Rank every trade I audited on that one check and telecommunications comes to rest at 66.1%, 9 of 47, and nothing else this trade does lands anywhere near that high.
Behind that percentage sit 3,555 telecom businesses I pulled from 24 cities, and a live site answered at 2,404 of those addresses.
So your trade didn’t refuse the counting. You bought it, or a web guy switched it on for you in 2019 and never mentioned it again.
So if there’s a little money to spend, I’d put it on the parts of the site your buyer actually touches. The counting is bought and paid for.
Analytics is a job sheet that fills itself in. Every visit, which page got opened, what happened next, whether the same person came back on Thursday afternoon to read your pricing a second time.
Written up all day, every day, by nobody. Read by nobody either.
You already know what a job sheet is worth. Nothing at all, right up until the Tuesday a customer swears your crew never showed, and then it becomes the only paper in the building worth having.
The question a ringing phone can’t answer
The phone rings. Good. Which of the six things you pay for made it ring?
There’s the directory listing you renew out of habit, the sponsored spot, the van wrap, the association page with your logo on it, and the fellow two cities over who runs your ads and sends an invoice you stopped reading in March.
A ringing phone tells you that the marketing worked. It doesn’t tell you which marketing worked, so you keep paying for all of it, including whichever one died quietly a year ago.
Cancel one tomorrow. Which one, and how would you know you’d picked right?
Your site has been answering that question every day of its life, in a tab nobody opens.
Travel runs on that silence too. Two minutes tells one of those owners whether last Sunday got written down anywhere, and the counting is already switched on.
The busiest day he never noticed
A phone system dealer I know found this out sideways, and it cost him a working day before he did.
His biggest day of traffic all year wasn’t a campaign or a mailer. It was the morning a carrier went down and every customer he had went looking for news about it.
They landed on a page nobody had touched since the year it was written, learned nothing, and rang the office instead. All of them, inside about an hour.
Two of his techs spent that day saying “we know, we’re on it” into a handset instead of being out on installs, which is the most expensive kind of quiet day there is.
One paragraph on a status page would have bought that day back. Nobody thought to write it, because nobody reads the sheet.
So what does your website do on the worst day of your year? Not the best day. The worst one.
The objection under the objection
The real reason he doesn’t look isn’t the one he gave me, and I think he’d admit that if I pushed.
It’s time. He’s quoting, scheduling, chasing a carrier for a cross connect that should have been done in April, and here I am asking him to study graphs.
So don’t study anything. Ten minutes on the last Friday of the month, three questions, written in the same notebook you write jobs in:
- Which pages did people read on the days the phone rang most?
- Where were those people before they landed on you?
- Which page do most people leave from?
Three months of that and the pattern shows up on its own, without a consultant, a meeting or a single word of the vocabulary those dashboards are so fond of.
Ten minutes on a Friday belongs with the other monthly jobs a website asks of you, and it is the cheapest one on that list.
A counter will never tell you why a customer left your pricing page, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something expensive. It tells you where and when, and you supply the why, because you understand your own customers better than any web guy ever will.
While you’re in there, look at how many people gave up before your homepage had finished arriving on their phone. Telecom pages come out of my phone test at 55 out of 100, which is a strange result for a trade that sells speed for a living.
Being excellent at one thing hasn’t carried the rest of it either. Add up the ten checks I run and telecom lands on 70 out of 100, which is the sort of score you get from one strong habit and a lot of neglected ones.
Dentists manage the reverse of it. They watch their websites more closely than almost anyone, and plenty of them don’t have one.
I build telecom websites for a living, so weigh everything I’ve said against that. It’s also why owners ask me for the rebuild first and the reading last, when I’d rather it went the other way round.
What changes if you do it
Nothing dramatic. Nobody’s Tuesday gets better because a line on a graph moved half an inch.
But in three months you’ll be able to say one sentence you can’t say today and be right about it: you’ll know where your last ten jobs came from.
That sentence cancels an invoice, or it doubles down on the one thing quietly working, and the whole habit costs you half an hour spread across a quarter.
That’s the entire promise. I’m not going to pretend it’s bigger than it is.
Want me to read yours first? Send me the address and I’ll tell you what your own site has been writing down all this time while nobody was looking.
