The First Five Numbers Worth Looking At

The problem with the reports

An analytics tool presents dozens of screens and hundreds of figures, almost all of which are irrelevant to a five-page business site.

Which produces one of two outcomes: somebody looks once, finds it overwhelming, and never returns; or they fixate on a number that does not matter.

The useful set is small. Four figures from the tool, checked monthly, plus one you keep yourself.

Everything else in the tool can be safely ignored until some specific question makes it relevant.

One: how many people

The headline number, and useful mainly as a trend rather than as a figure.

Two hundred visitors a month means nothing on its own. Two hundred against ninety last year means something.

What to watch: the direction over months, and any sudden change in either direction.

A sharp drop usually means something broke: a page removed, a tag missing, a site problem, or a listing change. A sharp rise usually means one page was shared somewhere.

Compare against the same month last year rather than last month, because seasonality dominates most small businesses and December against November tells you about Christmas rather than about your site.

Two: which pages they read

The most immediately useful figure and the one most likely to surprise.

Businesses routinely find that the page they consider central is barely visited, and that something written casually years ago receives most of the traffic.

What to do with it: write more like the pages that work, and improve or remove the ones nobody reads.

Also worth looking at which page people arrive on, which is frequently not the homepage. If most visitors land on one service page, that page is the front door and should be treated as such.

That single insight changes where the effort belongs more than any other figure in the entire tool.

Three: where they came from

• Search, which is people finding you cold.
• Direct, which is people who typed the address or had it saved.
• Referral, which is other sites linking to you.
• Social, if you use it.

The proportions tell you what is actually working. A business investing in social while ninety percent of visits come from search is spending effort in the wrong place.

Direct traffic is worth watching for a different reason: it includes people who saw your van, your listing or a printed advert, which makes it a rough signal for offline activity.

Four: what happens on the enquiry page

The number closest to money, and the one small businesses least often set up.

How many people reach the contact page, and how many of those submit anything.

A large gap between the two is a specific, fixable problem: a form that is too long, a broken submission, or a missing reason to act.

Setting this up requires marking the form submission as a goal or an event, which takes a few minutes and is the single most worthwhile configuration step.

Without it, analytics tells you about traffic and nothing about outcomes, which is the difference between interesting and useful.

Five: enquiries and where they came from

The number that is not in the tool, and the most valuable of the five.

A spreadsheet with one row per enquiry: the date, what it was for, how they found you, and whether it became work.

That answers questions analytics cannot, because it connects marketing to revenue rather than to visits.

It also survives every tool change, and after a year it is the record you use to decide where money goes.

Thirty seconds per enquiry, and almost no small business keeps it, which is why questions about what is working are usually answered with an impression.

A worked example

A business convinced its blog was pointless and considering removing it.

The pages report showed two articles accounting for a substantial share of all visits, both answering practical questions about a specific service.

The enquiry log, once they started keeping one, showed several jobs a month arriving from people who mentioned reading one of them.

The rest of the blog was genuinely unread and was removed.

They wrote four more articles in the same shape as the two that worked, which produced more of the same.

Without the two records together, the reasonable decision would have been deleting all of it.

The counter-case

Numbers that look important and are not, for a small site.

Bounce rate, which is frequently misread. Somebody landing on a page, finding your phone number and calling is recorded identically to somebody leaving in disgust.

Average session duration, which is heavily distorted by how it is measured and means little at low volumes.

Real-time reports, which are entertaining and tell you nothing actionable.

And any figure based on a handful of visits, where the variation between months is larger than any effect you could measure.

Why the tool cannot tell you everything

A limitation worth understanding rather than fighting.

A large and growing share of visitors block tracking, through browser settings, privacy features or extensions.

Which means your visitor count is an undercount, by an unknown and varying amount, and always has been.

That is fine for trends, since the undercount is reasonably consistent month to month, and it is a poor basis for precise claims.

It is another reason the enquiry log matters more than the dashboard: every enquiry is a real person, counted exactly, regardless of what their browser allowed.

Treat analytics as a directional instrument and the enquiry log as the record, rather than the other way round.

Where the numbers should live

A practical note, since a report you have to log in to check is a report nobody checks.

Most analytics tools will email a monthly summary, which arrives without anybody remembering to look.

Set that up once, to whoever actually makes decisions, and it turns a task into something that happens automatically.

The enquiry log should be somewhere equally easy: a spreadsheet in shared storage rather than a notebook, so more than one person can add to it and nobody has to be present.

The habit fails on friction rather than on intent. Reducing the friction is most of what makes it survive past March.

A monthly routine

1. Visitors, against the same month last year.
2. Top five pages and top five entry pages.
3. Source proportions.
4. Contact page visits against submissions.
5. Your enquiry log, totalled by source.

Fifteen minutes, once a month, and it answers considerably more than a dashboard checked every morning.

What to do about the privacy side of collecting it is covered in installing analytics without breaking privacy rules.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.