You know what you earned. You do not know which advert earned it.

A business with one or two vans is not spending a fraction of its turnover on advertising the way a fifty-van operation does; it is spending a number the owner feels every month.

That makes the stakes of a wrong answer higher rather than lower, and it is the reason 'we are too small for attribution' gets the logic backwards.

Two exports and an afternoon produce the number, and at this scale the number usually points at one channel that should stop and one that should get more.

Nothing about the method needs a marketing department. It needs a file of invoices and a file of leads with a phone number on each, and it is the same method a company with fifty vans would use on the same two files.

Ask any established one-van operator where the work comes from and the answer is recommendations. Ask for the proportion and nobody has it.

Because no invoice arrives for a referral, it sits outside every advertising report, which makes the paid channels look like a larger share of the business than they are.

Recording it as a source when the call is taken — one question, one field — puts it into the same comparison on the same money.

The result usually changes what the owner does next: a business that is eighty per cent referral has a retention problem to solve, not an advertising one.

A householder who liked the work calls the same tradesperson again, sometimes for years, and every one of those jobs is revenue that no advert produced.

Credited to the original channel it makes that channel look extraordinary; credited to nothing it disappears into Direct / Unknown and makes every channel look weak.

The report separates first jobs from later ones and leaves the judgement to you, with both numbers visible.

For a small operator this split is usually the most useful thing in the file, because it puts a value on doing the work well rather than on buying more leads.

A wrap on the van and a board outside the job are real advertising, and both produce calls that arrive identically to every other call.

One tracked number on the van, different from the one on the website, separates them for a few pounds a month, and that is the whole apparatus required.

Without it the report is honest but blunt: it will show a large Direct / Unknown bucket and say so rather than distributing it across whatever else was running.

With it, a small operator can finally compare a wrap against a directory listing against a search advert on money rather than on impression.

The same logic applies to a board left outside a finished job. It is the cheapest advertising in the trade and the only one that reaches the neighbours of somebody who already chose you, which is a better audience than any targeting option you can buy.