Asking “how did you find us?” almost never works

It’s common in business to ask your customers “how did you find us?”, as it can be very helpful as you work to understand where to put your future marketing spend and effort. The problem is that the answers you get are almost never accurate.

It’s not that people are lying, but they simply can’t accurately tell you what happened. Rand Fishkin at SparkToro recently shared a great video where he laid out the two main problems.

• If you give people a list of options to choose from, the items at the top of the list (no matter what order they’re in) get picked the most.
• They did a test where a company put in a fake answer that sounded realistic (“Did you come from this popular Youtuber?”) and a lot of the respondents chose that as the answer, even though it literally couldn’t have been the case.

He goes on to share the bigger problem; you can ask your customers how they found you, but what about the people that don’t know about you? How can you position yourself so that they can find you as well?

There is a similar problem when you dig into keyword research for search engine optimization. You can run reports showing the keywords that people typed in to find your site, and that’s great! The problem is that you really want to know what keywords people are typing in and not finding your site, and that won’t show up on any report.

I encourage you to keep asking your customers “how did you find us?”, as it’ll certainly give you some degree of insight, but just beware that the information you get is unlikely to be very accurate. Check out Rand’s video for more.