You've tried to answer this before. Here's why you're still guessing.

"It's on the intake form"

The field exists; the chain breaks after it. Patients tick "internet" (which internet?), staff skip transcribing it, and nobody ever joins the answers to revenue. A field that's collected but never reported is a ritual, not a record. The tell: try to produce last quarter's answers right now. If it takes more than five minutes, the field is decorative.

"We have Google Analytics"

GA sees your website — not your phone, not your walk-ins, not the referral who never visited the site, and not the booking that happened three weeks after the click. For a local business where the phone is the front door, web analytics covers a minority of arrivals and says nothing about revenue. It's a real instrument aimed at a fraction of the question.

"The agency sends a monthly report"

Graded homework, self-graded. The report counts what the agency's tools can see and defines success in the agency's terms — impressions, clicks, "conversions" that may or may not be humans who paid you. Even honest vendors can only testify about their own channel; none of them can see your bank deposits. Attribution has to live in YOUR records or it's marketing about marketing.

"We ask people when we remember"

Sometimes-capture produces a biased sample at the worst possible resolution: the memorable answers stick ("my neighbor Carol!") and the mundane majority ("uh, Google?") blurs. Decisions then overweight the anecdotes. Capture works when it's structural — every new contact, same question, recorded — and that's a workflow change, not a memo.

"We tried call tracking once"

Tracked numbers work — when the answers land somewhere and someone reads them. Bought as a gadget, they generate one more self-contained report nobody joins to bookings, and the subscription quietly dies. Tracking is a link, not the chain.

What tracing changes

Each attempt watches one link. The trace follows the whole chain through a real month — arrival to record to revenue — and shows exactly which links are dropping the trail. Then you know which fix is worth buying, before you buy it.