Web Analytics

What web analytics is

Web analytics is the practice of tracking who visits your website, where they came from, what they looked at, and what they did. Used well, it's one of the more useful tools a small business has. Used poorly, it's a pile of numbers that consumes time without producing insight.

What you can actually track

• Traffic volume: How many people visit your site, and when.
• Traffic sources: Where visitors come from - organic search, direct (typing your URL), referrals from other sites, social media, or paid ads.
• Pages viewed: Which pages people look at, and in what order.
• Time on page: A rough indicator of engagement. (Very rough - someone who left a tab open looks like a very engaged reader.)
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing just one page.
• Conversions: Whether visitors do what you want them to do - fill out a contact form, call you, buy something.

The tools

Google Analytics is free and the most widely used. It's powerful, but the current version has a steep learning curve and a data model that shares your visitor information with Google's advertising systems.

Privacy-focused alternatives - Plausible, Fathom, and similar tools - are simpler to read and don't share your visitor data with ad networks. They typically cost $9-15/month.

What to actually pay attention to

Most small businesses don't need a complex analytics dashboard. The three things that matter most:

1. How much total traffic are you getting?
2. Where is it coming from?
3. Are visitors doing what you want them to do?

Everything else is context for those questions.

Common mistakes

• Watching daily numbers and getting anxious about normal fluctuations. Look at monthly trends instead.
• Optimizing for traffic without caring about who's visiting. 1,000 visitors who don't need your service is less useful than 50 who do.
• Setting up analytics and never looking at it.
• Letting the data paralyze decisions. Analytics informs decisions; it doesn't make them.