How many customers does your website actually bring in
Before high season, set up four simple counters on your site: calls, WhatsApp, bookings, directions. By April you will finally know what it earns you.
Ask ten business owners in St Martin or St Barts how many customers their website brings in. The most common answer is a shrug. "People tell me they saw it." Sometimes that is true, sometimes it is not, and nobody knows the ratio.
The website is rarely the problem. The problem is that nothing is being counted. And mid September is exactly the right time to start: if the counters are running before the first high season searches come in, by April you will have a real answer in numbers instead of a hunch.
How do I know how many customers my website brings in?
By counting the actions that come right before a sale: a call started from the site, a WhatsApp chat opened, a form sent, a booking confirmed. Visitor numbers are not enough, because they tell you how many people stopped by, not how many wanted to buy. Four or five well tracked actions beat fifty charts.
Traffic does not pay the rent
A site can get thousands of visits a month and sell nothing, or a few hundred and fill a restaurant every night. What matters are conversions: the moment a visitor actually does something. For a small business on the islands, the list is almost always the same.
Tapping the phone number. On a phone, a clickable number starts the call, and every tap can be counted.
Tapping the WhatsApp button. It is often the first way people reach you here, and it is the easiest action to measure.
Sending a contact or quote form. Count it only when the message has actually gone through, not when someone lands on the contact page.
Completing a booking. Table, villa, boat trip, car rental: the confirmation page is the most reliable counter there is.
Your Google listing is already counting for you
Before touching the website, open the performance stats on your Google Business Profile. Google shows, month by month, the calls made from your listing, the direction requests and the clicks through to your site. For a restaurant in Grand Case or a shop in Philipsburg, direction requests are a great signal: those are people on their way to you.
If your listing is out of date, start there. We walked through the settings that matter in our Google Business Profile guide for island businesses.
What to install on the website
A lightweight analytics tool. Some do not set cookies and weigh a few kilobytes. That matters twice: for privacy rules (the French side of the island and St Barts fall under GDPR), and for speed. A heavy tracking script can slow down the very site it is meant to measure, and past 3 seconds on mobile, 53% of visitors give up (Google study).
One event per action. Every tap on the phone number, every WhatsApp tap, every form sent gets logged under a plain name you will actually recognise, not a technical label nobody reads.
Tagged links for your campaigns. The link in your Instagram bio, on your NFC business card, the one you sent to a concierge service: each can carry a small tag in the URL (a UTM parameter). Come April, you will know which one really sent people your way.
On the websites we build for restaurants, these counters are in place from launch day: tap to call, tap to WhatsApp, reservation completed. The owner has nothing to set up.
The trap: starting too late
The temptation is to look at the numbers in January, when everyone is slammed, and discover there is nothing to compare them to. A number only means something next to another one: this season against last season, this month against the same month next year, the English pages against the French ones.
Here is the routine we recommend:
- September or October: install the counters and check they report (tap every button yourself, from your own phone).
- The first of every month: write down four numbers in a spreadsheet. Calls, WhatsApp, forms, bookings. Ten minutes.
- End of April: review the season, then decide with real data what to improve during the quiet months.
Measurable, not promised
We never promise anyone a spot on the first page of Google, and we are wary of anyone who does. What we do promise is that you will know. A fast site, loading in under 2 seconds with a PageSpeed score of 90+, that counts its calls and bookings lets you judge your investment on facts. And if the numbers disappoint, they also tell you where to look: few visits means a visibility problem; plenty of visits and few taps means the page itself needs work.
Our website pricing is public — or get your quote within 24 hours, with conversion tracking included.