Most small business owners know they should have analytics on their website. Far fewer actually look at them. And a surprising number have analytics set up incorrectly, or not at all, meaning every decision they make about their website is based on gut feel rather than evidence.
That’s a problem worth fixing. Not because you need to become a data analyst, but because even basic website data tells you things you can’t find out any other way.
What Can Website Analytics Actually Tell You?
Analytics are often framed as a technical topic. They’re not. They’re a business tool.
Even a modest amount of traffic data answers questions that matter: Which pages are people actually reading? Where are visitors dropping off before they get in touch? Are people finding you through Google, social media, or word of mouth? How many people visit your contact page and then leave without enquiring?
Without analytics, you’re guessing at all of this. With them, you’re making decisions based on what’s actually happening.
You don’t need thousands of visitors for this to be useful. A small business with 200 visitors a month can still learn a lot from knowing that 60% of them are landing on a services page and leaving immediately, or that almost no one is finding the blog posts you’ve spent time writing.
What Changed: Universal Analytics Is Gone
If your website was built before 2023 and hasn’t been touched since, there’s a real chance you’re collecting no data at all.
Google’s original analytics platform, Universal Analytics (UA), was switched off in July 2023. Any website still running the old UA tracking code stopped collecting data at that point. The replacement, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), is a different product with a different tracking code. Simply having an old Google Analytics account doesn’t mean you’re set up on GA4.
This catches a lot of small business owners off guard. They log into Google Analytics, see data from a couple of years ago, and assume everything is fine. It isn’t. If the GA4 migration was never done, your site has been tracking nothing ever since.
The first thing to check is whether your site has a GA4 property set up and whether the tracking code is actually installed and collecting data.
What GA4 Actually Tracks (and What to Focus On)
GA4 is more powerful than its predecessor, but also more complex. As a small business owner, you don’t need most of it. There are four metrics worth paying attention to:
- Users: how many individual people visited your site in a given period. A basic measure of reach.
- Sessions: how many visits occurred. One user can have multiple sessions if they come back on different days.
- Engagement rate: the percentage of sessions where someone actually interacted with your site, scrolled, clicked, or spent time reading. This replaced the old bounce rate metric and is generally more useful. A high engagement rate means people are finding what they came for.
- Key Events (formerly Conversions): the actions that actually matter to your business. A contact form submission, a phone number click, a booking. GA4 calls these Key Events and can track all of them, but they need to be configured. Out of the box, GA4 won’t know what a meaningful action looks like for your specific business.
Everything else in GA4 is detail you can explore once you’ve got the basics working. Don’t let the complexity of the platform put you off using the parts that matter.
Is Your GA4 Set Up Correctly?
Having GA4 installed and having it set up correctly are two different things. Run through this checklist:
If you’re not sure how to check any of these, your web developer should be able to confirm them quickly. It’s also worth connecting your GA4 property to Google Search Console, which adds search-specific data like which keywords are bringing people to your site and which pages are ranking.
How Often Should You Actually Look at It?
Analytics are only useful if you look at them. But you don’t need to check them every day.
A monthly review is enough for most small businesses. Set aside 15 minutes, look at your top pages, check your key event numbers, and note anything that has changed significantly. Over time, you’ll build a picture of what’s working and what isn’t, which gives you something concrete to act on.
The goal isn’t to become obsessed with numbers. It’s to stop flying blind.
Not sure whether your analytics are set up correctly or what the data is telling you? We’re happy to take a look as part of a broader conversation about your website.
