I Checked Every Car Wash Website in Fall River. One Was Measuring Anything.

There is a piece of conventional wisdom I have heard from four different Fall River business owners this year, and I have heard it most confidently from the ones who wash cars:

"A car wash is a drive-by business. Either they turn in or they don't. I'd know if something was working."

It sounds like common sense. And a car wash is genuinely one of the most honest businesses on the SouthCoast. There is no consultation, no upsell funnel, no six-week sales cycle. Somebody's car is dirty, they pay you, twenty minutes later it isn't. The owners I have met run their sites on thin margins, in New England weather, with equipment that costs more than most people's houses. Nobody is coasting.

So I wanted to know whether the wisdom was actually true. Not argue with it. Test it.

The method, so you can repeat it#

On 1 September 2026 I listed every car wash I could identify in Fall River and the two towns that touch it, Somerset and Swansea. Twelve businesses.

For each one I looked for a website. For each website I found, I fetched the homepage once, over HTTPS, using a mobile browser signature, and read the raw HTML that came back for any of a fixed list of measurement tags: Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, Plausible, Fathom, Matomo, PostHog.

Two honest limits on that. First, a tag that gets injected later by JavaScript would not show up in a first-load fetch, so a site I recorded as "none detected" could still have one running. Second, I could not run Lighthouse on any of these sites — Avalon's PageSpeed key was returning a permissions error the morning I ran this, so every performance number you would normally see in one of these pieces is simply not measured today. I am not going to estimate one.

Everyone below is anonymised. These businesses did not volunteer to be graded in public, and grading them in public is not the point.

What came back#

Site C answered my request with seventeen bytes my checker could not decode. That is a checker problem, not a verdict on the business, and I am recording it as unmeasured rather than pretending it means something. Site D's listed domain does not resolve at all — which tells you the directory is stale, not that the business is.

The eight with no findable website are not invisible. Most of them have a Google Business Profile, a phone number people actually dial, and years of local reputation. A wash on the right corner in this city does not need a website to have customers.

But look at Site B again. It is the only one carrying a Meta Pixel, and it is the only one of the five that belongs to a multi-location group rather than a single owner in this city.

That is the finding. The myth says nobody in this business measures anything, because there is nothing to measure. The reality is that somebody is measuring — it just isn't the person who has been here longest.

Where I'd stop you before you install anything#

The obvious response is "fine, I'll put Google Analytics on my site Monday." Please don't do that as your first move, and here is why.

Fishkin's point, made about companies far larger than yours, applies harder to a car wash than to almost anyone. Somebody sees your sign on the way to work in March. In June their car gets covered in pollen and they think of you. They type your name into their phone, tap the top result, and drive over. Every analytics tool on earth files that as "direct traffic" — a customer who came from nowhere, credited to nothing.

Install a dashboard expecting it to tell you what's working and it will confidently tell you the wrong thing. That is worse than not knowing, because now you're making decisions on it.

So the honest version of this article's advice is narrower than "get analytics." It is: measure the one thing that is genuinely yours, genuinely first-party, and genuinely about intent.

The free fix, and you can do it before you open Monday#

Open Google Business Profile on your phone. Go to the Performance tab. Find Searches — the search terms people actually typed that surfaced your business.

That is free, it takes about four minutes, there is no code and no website required, and it works whether or not you have one. Google's own documentation describes exactly what it covers: how customers use Search and Maps to find your profile, and what they do once they get there (Google Business Profile Help).

Here is what you are looking for. If you run a touchless wash and half your search terms say "touchless car wash near me," that is your sign copy, your Business Profile description, and your Facebook post, handed to you by your own customers. If people are searching "car wash open now" at 7pm on a Sunday and your hours say you closed at five, you have just found a leak that no amount of advertising fixes.

Write down your top ten terms. Compare them to the words actually on your sign and your profile. Those two lists disagreeing is the cheapest problem you will ever find.

The three fixes, cheapest first#

Free, 4 minutes. The Business Profile Searches report above. Do this one regardless of everything else in this article.

Free, 20 minutes. Check that your hours are right for every day, including holidays, and that your phone number on the profile is the one that rings where somebody answers. In this sample, one of the three measurable sites had no tap-to-call link at all — meaning a customer on a phone has to memorise ten digits and switch apps. That is a real, silent loss, and it will never show up in any report.

Roughly an hour, still free. Put your prices on a page a person can read on a phone. Not one of the sites I could measure showed a price on the homepage. The belief is that hiding prices stops people shopping you. What it actually does is send someone who was ninety seconds from choosing you back to the map to pick whoever answered the question.

None of that requires a rebuild, a retainer, or my phone number.

If you want the fourth thing — a site that loads fast, states your prices, and tells you honestly which searches brought people to it — that is the part I do. I am in Fall River, I answer my own phone, and I will tell you when you don't need me.

774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com