Web Analytics

What web analytics is

It measures where visitors come from, which pages they land on, what they do next, and whether they take the actions you care about: buying, booking, calling, filling in a form.

Without clean tracking, every other decision is a guess.

It matters because almost every marketing question ends in it. Did the redesign help? Which campaign brought customers, not just clicks? Did the new page win the traffic it was written for? Each of those has an answer only if the data behind it is right.

The tools and how they fit

Most sites today use three parts that hand data to each other. Knowing which part does what makes most tracking problems easy to place.

Example names for illustration.

Search Console reports what happens before the click: the searches your site appeared for, impressions, clicks and average position. It is not in GA4, and GA4 can’t replace it. Bing Webmaster Tools does the same for Bing.

What to track

Start with the questions, not the tool. For most sites they are:

1. Where do visitors come from? Channels and campaigns, which depend on tagged links.
2. Where do they land? The landing page report shows which pages do the work of attracting people.
3. What do they do that matters? Your key events: purchases with their value, leads, bookings, calls.
4. Where do they drop out? A funnel from the first meaningful step to the conversion.

Then compare like with like. A week against the same week a year earlier removes seasonality; a week against the week before mostly measures noise.

Reading reports without fooling yourself

Watch the sample size. A page with 40 visits that converted twice hasn’t proven anything. Wait for enough visits, or combine weeks, before calling a change a win.

Separate the channel from the page. If organic visits fell, check whether it was every page or a few. One page losing its ranking is a different problem from a sitewide drop, and the fix is different too.

Look for the cause in the calendar. A sudden change in the numbers on a specific day usually has a cause on that day: a release, a tag change, a campaign starting or ending, a Google update. Keep a simple log of changes, and annotate the dates.

Ask what the number would change. Before building a report, decide what you’d do differently if the figure went up or down. A metric that wouldn’t change a decision is noise you don’t need to watch.

Measurement in a privacy-first web

Consent banners, ad blockers and browser privacy features mean no analytics tool sees every visitor. GA4’s Consent Mode lets tags respect a visitor’s choice while Google models some of what it can’t observe. The practical rule is to know your baseline: record when a consent change, a new banner or a tag change went live, so a drop in the numbers isn’t mistaken for a drop in business.

How to check it yourself

Four checks tell you most of what you need to know, and none of them needs a developer.

1. 1
   Click through a typical visit.

   Open your site with Google's Tag Assistant connected and click through a typical visit: land, browse, start the action that matters, finish it. Each step should fire the event you expect, once. Then open GA4's Realtime report while you do it. If an event doesn't appear, or appears twice, the setup needs fixing before any report can be trusted.
2. 2
   See where visits come from.

   In GA4, open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. If Direct or Unassigned is a large share of visits, links aren't tagged consistently. Open Engagement, then Landing page, and check that your most important pages are near the top.
3. 3
   List your key events.

   In GA4's admin, look at which events are marked as key events. Enquiries, bookings and purchases should be; page views and scrolls shouldn't.
4. 4
   Compare with Search Console.

   Visits from Google's organic results in GA4 and clicks in Search Console never match exactly, but they should move together. If one drops and the other doesn't, tracking is the first suspect.

Connect Google Analytics and Search Console to SMARTSEO and see your traffic and top pages in plain words: visits from organic search compared with the same weeks a year earlier, the channels and landing pages that bring people, your sales if you sell online, and the pages Google shows often that few people click. Each section says when its data couldn’t be read rather than showing a zero.

Before and after: tracking a quote form

<!-- in the page template -->
<button onclick="gtag('event',
  'Submit_Quote_Btn')">

// after the form is accepted
dataLayer.push({
  event: 'generate_lead',
  form_id: 'quote'
});

Example for illustration; not a client's data.