Open any analytics tool and you are faced with dozens of charts: sessions, users, engagement rate, events, channels. It is easy to spend an hour looking at them and come away knowing nothing useful. For a small business, only a few numbers really tell you whether your website is doing its job.
1. Enquiries
This is the number that matters most, and the one most often missing. How many people contacted you through the website this month: form submissions, calls from the website, booked calls, quote requests?
If you only track one thing, track this. A simple way: ask every new customer how they found you, and count the website ones. Better: make sure your forms and bookings are counted automatically.
2. Conversion rate
Divide enquiries by the number of visitors. If 500 people visited and 10 got in touch, that is 2 per cent. The exact figure matters less than the trend: if it drops after a change to your site, something got harder; if it rises, you are on the right track.
3. Where visitors come from
Search, Google Maps, social media, a directory, another website linking to you, or typing your address directly. Knowing which sources bring visitors who actually get in touch tells you where to spend your time. A source that sends lots of visitors but no enquiries is less valuable than it looks.
4. Which pages people land on
Many visitors never see your home page. They arrive on a service page from Google or a blog post someone shared. Check which pages people land on most, then make sure each of those pages explains what you do and makes it easy to get in touch.
5. What people search for
Google Search Console, which is free, shows the searches that brought people to your website and how often your pages appeared. It is the most direct view of how customers look for what you sell, and it often reveals services or areas you were not mentioning clearly enough.
6. Speed on mobile
Most visitors arrive on a phone. A page that takes several seconds to appear loses people before they read a word. Check your mobile speed every few months, and after any big change.
Numbers to stop worrying about
- Total visitors on its own. A thousand visitors who are not your customers are worth less than fifty who are.
- Bounce rate in isolation. Someone who lands on your contact page, finds your number and calls you has "bounced", and that is a success.
- Social media likes. Pleasant, but they do not pay invoices.
Collect data the right way
In the UK, analytics tools that use cookies need visitors' consent first. On our own website, for example, Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity only load after a visitor clicks "Accept", and cookie-free statistics cover the basics for everyone else. It is the honest way to measure, and it keeps you on the right side of the rules.
A simple monthly habit
Once a month, spend ten minutes writing down four figures: visitors, enquiries, the top three sources and the top three landing pages. After a few months you will see patterns that no dashboard will point out for you.
If you are not sure what your website is measuring, or whether the numbers are right, get in touch. We can set up analytics with consent on any website we build and look after on our Care Plan.