The Year's Traffic Report in Twenty Minutes

The report nobody needs to write

At the end of the year it is tempting either to produce a long report full of charts, or to skip the whole thing.

Neither helps much. The long report gets read once, and skipping it means next year's decisions are made from memory.

For most small businesses, a year on the website comes down to a few questions: did more people find the site, did more of them get in touch, what brought them, and what changed along the way.

Twenty minutes in Google Analytics, with a notepad beside the keyboard, answers them.

Set the dates first

Use January 1 to November 30. Those are complete months, and December is unusual enough in most businesses to distort any comparison.

Tick the option to compare with the previous year, so every report shows both years side by side.

Have January's figures beside you: the visits and enquiries for that month, noted at the start of the year. If nobody noted them, set the range to January alone for a minute and write them down now.

Then check that tracking ran all year. A flat line or a week of zeros means missing data, not a missing week of customers.

The figures to write down

• Users for the eleven months, against the same months last year.
• Enquiries: completed goals, plus calls and emails from your own records.
• Enquiries per month now, against the January figure.
• The phone share of visits, from the device report.
• The three sources that brought most enquiries, not most visits.

The second is the figure that matters, and Analytics sees only part of it. Form submissions can be counted as goals; phone calls and emails usually cannot, so add them from the call log, the inbox or the booking book.

Visits, read with care

Visits can grow for reasons that bring no work at all: a blog post that ranks for something unrelated, regulars checking a schedule, or spam.

Referral spam, fake visits recorded from unfamiliar domains, has padded many small sites' figures over the past couple of years. Open the referrals list and look for addresses you do not recognise before trusting the total.

And one page with a huge share of visits deserves a second look. It may be doing a useful job, just not the job of finding new customers.

The pages that brought enquiries

Open the landing pages report and choose your enquiry goal in the conversions columns. Sort by completions.

The top five rows show where enquiring visits began. Write them down, with how many enquiries each one started.

Pages with plenty of visits and almost no enquiries go on a second, shorter list. They are not failures, but they are not where next year's attention should start.

Where the enquiries came from

The channels report, again with the enquiry goal selected, shows which sources sent the visitors who got in touch: search, referrals from directories and other sites, social media, email and paid ads.

Note the three that matter and anything surprising. A directory listing you forgot you paid for may be doing more than the social account that takes an hour a week, or the reverse.

Treat direct with suspicion. It often means a lost source, such as a link in an email or a PDF, rather than people typing your address.

A worked example

A billiards hall with eighteen tables, a small kitchen and league nights twice a week takes private party and company event bookings through a form and by phone.

The owner expected a long job. The landing pages report showed that most visits began on the league standings page, which players had checked every week since the standings moved onto the site in the spring.

The enquiries told a different story. Nearly all the party requests through the form began on the parties page, arriving from search, and the busiest months for them were October and November.

Phone bookings were not in Analytics at all. The booking book at the counter took five minutes to count, and it held more party bookings than the form did.

The three notes: the monthly enquiry count to beat, form and phone together; the parties page as next year's first job; and a saved segment that leaves out league visitors, so new customers can be seen apart from regulars.

The whole exercise took twenty-five minutes, including the booking book.

Match the jumps to what happened

Look at the year's graph of users, then of enquiries, and find the three largest rises or drops.

Beside each, write what happened then: a new page, an ad campaign started or paused, a newsletter, a busy season, a broken form. Annotations make this a minute's work; without them, the calendar and the sent folder will do.

A change that coincides with a jump has not been shown to cause it. Write it down anyway, as a question for next year.

Three notes for next year

The first note is the number to beat: enquiries per month, all routes counted, with this year's best and worst months.

The second is what earned them: the pages and sources at the top of both lists, which deserve protecting and improving before anything new is built.

The third is the gap: whatever could not be measured this year, such as calls, a goal that broke, or a source hidden inside direct. Fixing it in January makes next December's twenty minutes more accurate.

The counter-case

On a small site, with visits in the hundreds each month, the figures swing about for no real reason. A tally of enquiries, and a question to each new customer about how they found you, teaches more than any chart.

A strongly seasonal business should compare its season with last year's season rather than the whole year. A site rebuilt or re-tracked partway through the year may not compare cleanly at all, so note where the break falls.

For most businesses, though, twenty minutes and three notes are enough to start next year from evidence rather than memory.

The twenty minutes

1. Set January to November against last year.
2. Note users and completed goals.
3. Add calls and emails from your own records.
4. List the top landing pages for enquiries.
5. List the sources that brought enquiries.
6. Match the big changes to dated events.
7. Write three notes for next year.

Step three keeps the comparison honest. Analytics sees forms but rarely phones, and a business that counts only what Analytics sees will undervalue the pages that make people call.

The dated notes that explain the graph's rises and drops are covered in annotations for every change you make.

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.