Every number, with its source.

This industry runs on invented statistics. Here's every number we're willing to say, where it came from, and the ones we refuse to use.

Six numbers we use

Say any of these back to us on the call and we can show you the study.

Companies that tried within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify a lead as companies that waited an hour longer.

The result came from 1.25 million sales leads across 42 US companies. Qualifying meant reaching a key decision maker for a real conversation, not closing a sale.

A separate audit in the same article sent enquiries to 2,241 US companies. 23% never responded. The study did not test text messages. Our takeaway is narrower: getting the enquiry in front of the owner quickly gives the business a chance to answer quickly.

Source: James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," Harvard Business Review 89, no. 3, March 2011.
hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads

5 to 9%

Among independent Seattle restaurants, one extra Yelp star was linked to 5 to 9% more revenue.

Michael Luca used Yelp's rounding cutoff as a natural experiment. A 3.24 average displayed as 3 stars and a 3.25 displayed as 3.5. Restaurants on either side of that cutoff had almost the same underlying rating, which helped separate the displayed star rating from other differences between restaurants.

Two caveats we would rather state than bury. The study covered Seattle restaurants only. And the effect showed up only for independent businesses, with none for chains. If you run an independent business, that second one is in your favor.

Source: Michael Luca, "Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com," Harvard Business School Working Paper 12-016, 2011, revised 2016.
hbs.edu, Working Paper 12-016

46.1%

How a site looks is the thing people mention most when they decide whether to trust a business.

2,684 people each judged two live websites and wrote down what made them credible or not. The look of the site came up in 46.1% of the comments, ahead of information design at 28.5% and information focus at 25.1%.

It's a Stanford study from 2002, and it has held up as the standard citation. The version everyone else quotes, that 75% of people judge a company on its website design, is a distortion of this one. We don't use that number.

Source: B.J. Fogg, Cathy Soohoo, David Danielsen, Leslie Marable, Julianne Stanford and Ellen R. Tauber, "How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?" Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab with Consumer WebWatch, 2002.
credibility.stanford.edu, How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility

8.4%

Across 37 brand sites, a 0.1 second mobile speed improvement was associated with 8.4% more retail conversions.

Average order value was 9.2% higher in the same retail data, and lead generation information pages had 8.3% lower bounce rates. The study covered retail, travel, luxury and lead generation brands in Europe and the US.

The researchers describe these results as correlations, not a promise that every site gets the same lift. The useful question is still simple: how fast does the site load on a phone?

Source: Google and Deloitte, "Milliseconds Make Millions," 2020.
thinkwithgoogle.com, Milliseconds Make Millions

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence.

Prominence is fed by your review count and your review score, among other signals. That is the honest reason we send a review request after every visit.

This one is Google describing its own product. No agency is guessing at how Google works, and that is the whole value of the citation.

Source: Google Business Profile Help, "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google."
support.google.com/business/answer/7091

74%

74% of 1,002 US adults said they look for reviews written in the last three months.

BrightLocal ran the survey with a representative panel through SurveyMonkey. BrightLocal also sells review software, which is worth knowing when you read the result.

The survey supports asking steadily instead of doing one big review push. It does not prove that an older review stops helping on a particular day.

Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. 1,002 US adults.
brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey

Numbers we won't use

You've seen all four of these on other companies' websites. We traced them and couldn't stand behind any of them, so they're not on this site.

"62% of business calls go unanswered." We could not find a primary study with a sample broad enough to support that claim for every small business.

"A 98% open rate for texts." We could not find a primary source that explains exactly how the open rate was measured, so we do not use it.

"We analyzed 4.2 million calls." We found versions of this claim with different company names and no study we could inspect. That is not good enough to put on a sales page.

Any dollar figure for what missed calls cost you. Every version of it multiplies two soft numbers together. What your missed calls cost depends on what a customer is worth to you and how many callers end up buying, so we'd rather work it out with your numbers on the call.

If we ever quote you a number, ask where it came from. We'll have an answer.

How to check us

Every source above is linked, and each link goes to the study itself or to Google's own documentation, never to a blog post about it. Two of them are PDFs.

If anything on this page turns out to be wrong, tell us and it comes off. That's happened once already. Our old pages said your phone number leaves with you when you cancel. It doesn't, and we took that line off every page instead of softening it.

Ask us a hard question

Bring the number you don't trust, and we'll show you where ours come from.

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