Auckland agency builds free tool to show business owners which ads actually work

An Auckland web design agency has built a WordPress plugin to tackle a problem it says costs small businesses thousands of dollars a year in wasted advertising spend: not knowing which ads are bringing in customers.

Forge Creative, a digital agency based in Auckland, has released LeadSourcePro, a free plugin that tracks exactly which advertising channel generated each enquiry on a business’s website. The tool was developed after the agency’s own clients repeatedly struggled to work out whether their money was better spent on Google, Facebook, or other platforms.

The problem, according to Forge Creative director Roger McSaveney, is that every advertising platform marks its own homework. Google’s reporting says the leads came from Google. Facebook’s reporting says they came from Facebook. When a business is advertising across several platforms at once, the numbers from each platform added together invariably exceed the actual number of enquiries received.

“We had clients spending five or six thousand a month across three platforms, and every platform was telling them it was working brilliantly,” McSaveney said. “But when you sat down and counted the actual leads that came through the door, the maths didn’t add up. Someone was overcounting, and usually it was everyone.”

The issue is a well-known frustration in digital marketing. Advertising platforms use what are known as attribution windows — periods after someone clicks an ad during which any subsequent action on the website is credited to that ad. Google uses a 30-day window. Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram advertising, uses seven days. If a potential customer clicks a Google ad on a Monday and a Facebook ad on a Thursday before making an enquiry on Friday, both platforms claim the credit.

LeadSourcePro sidesteps the problem by tracking from the website’s end rather than relying on ad platform data. When someone visits a website, the plugin records where they came from and attaches that information to any form they fill out. The business owner then sees the source alongside every enquiry, providing an independent record that isn’t filtered through a platform with a vested interest in looking effective.

McSaveney said the plugin grew out of a workaround the agency had been building manually for individual clients. “We kept writing the same bit of code for different clients, bolting tracking onto their forms one at a time. Eventually it made more sense to package it up properly so any WordPress site could use it.”

The plugin works with several popular WordPress form tools including Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, and WPForms, which between them power contact forms on millions of websites worldwide. It also addresses a technical quirk where WordPress strips tracking information from web addresses before it can be captured, a long-standing source of frustration for marketers.

Forge Creative has made the plugin available for free at leadsourcepro.net, a decision McSaveney said was deliberate. “The businesses that need this most are the ones spending two or three thousand a month on ads and trying to work out if it’s worth it. Charging them for the tool that answers that question felt like the wrong move.”