Website analytics: what small businesses should actually track

What is website analytics, and which tools do you need?

Website analytics is the measurement of who visits your website, how they found it and what they do once they arrive. For most small businesses, two free Google tools cover almost everything, with an optional third for seeing how people actually use a page.

GA4 is Google’s current analytics product; it replaced the older Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data in 2023. If someone set up “Google Analytics” for you years ago and nobody has touched it since, check that a GA4 property actually exists and is collecting data.

Which website metrics actually matter?

The website metrics that matter are the ones that connect visitors to revenue: where people come from, where they land, whether they engage, and whether they act. Everything else is context.

If you only have time for one number, make it key events per month, split by traffic source. That single view tells you which channels bring customers, not just visitors.

What are key events, and which should you set up?

Key events are the actions on your website that you have marked as valuable in GA4; Google renamed them from “conversions” in 2024. GA4 automatically records some activity, such as page views and outbound clicks, but it does not know which actions matter to your business until you tell it.

For a typical service business, set up these key events:

• Enquiry form submitted, ideally tracked by a visit to a thank-you page so you only count successful submissions.
• Booking completed, from your booking system’s confirmation step.
• Click to call, from taps on your phone number links on mobile.
• Chat clicks, for LINE, WhatsApp or Messenger buttons.
• Email clicks, for anyone who taps your email address.
• Brochure or price list download, if you offer one.

Keep the list short. If everything is a key event, nothing is. A newsletter sign-up and a booking request should not carry the same weight in your reports. If your forms rarely get submitted in the first place, our guide to contact forms that convert is the place to start.

How do you set up GA4 properly?

A proper GA4 setup takes a few hours and saves you from months of misleading data. Work through these steps, or ask your web developer to confirm each one is done.

1. Create a GA4 property and a web data stream for your domain, owned by your business’s Google account, not a freelancer’s.
2. Install the tag on every page, either directly or through Google Tag Manager.
3. Turn on enhanced measurement, which records scrolls, outbound clicks and file downloads automatically.
4. Create and mark your key events: forms, bookings, calls and chat clicks.
5. Change data retention to 14 months. The default for detailed reports is 2 months, which makes year-on-year comparisons impossible.
6. Exclude internal traffic so your own team’s visits do not inflate the numbers.
7. Link Google Search Console so search data appears alongside visitor behaviour.
8. Add a consent banner and configure consent mode, since privacy laws such as Thailand’s PDPA and the EU’s GDPR generally expect consent before non-essential cookies are set.
9. Test everything in GA4’s DebugView: submit a form, tap the phone number, and check each event appears.

Which numbers can you safely ignore?

You can safely ignore most of what analytics tools show you, because it describes activity rather than results. These are the numbers that look important but rarely change a decision:

• Total page views. Ten thousand views with no enquiries is worse than five hundred with ten.
• Daily ups and downs. Small sites have small numbers, and small numbers bounce around. Look at monthly trends.
• Average time on page, on its own. A visitor who finds your phone number in ten seconds and calls is a success.
• Real-time visitors. Interesting to watch, useless for planning.
• Follower counts on social media. What matters is whether social visitors reach your site and act.
• Percentages from tiny samples. A page with twelve visits and one enquiry does not have an 8% conversion rate in any meaningful sense.

Bounce rate deserves a note. In GA4 it is simply the opposite of engagement rate, so there is no need to track both. Focus on engagement and key events.

How often should you review your analytics, and what should you do with it?

Review your analytics once a month, for about thirty minutes, and finish every review with one specific change to make. Analytics only earns its keep when it changes what you do next.

1. Check key events for the month against the previous month and, once you have the data, the same month last year.
2. Split them by source: search, Maps, social, ads, referrals and direct.
3. Look at your top landing pages and their engagement. A popular page with weak engagement is your quickest win.
4. Open Search Console and note any new searches that show your site, and any indexing or Core Web Vitals warnings.
5. Write down one action: rewrite a headline, add a clearer button, create a page for a search you keep appearing for.

For campaigns, add UTM tags to every link you share in emails, ads and social bios, so GA4 can tell you exactly which post or newsletter sent the visitor. If a page gets traffic but few enquiries, read calls to action that work; if it gets few visitors, start with SEO basics for small business.

When PJW Partners builds a website, analytics and key events can be set up before launch, so you are measuring results from the first day. If you want help working out what your numbers are telling you, get in touch.

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