Website analytics for small businesses.
Most analytics advice is written for teams with a marketing department. If you are running the business and doing the work, four numbers matter and the rest is decoration.
The four that matter
Everything else is context for these.
- • Enquiries — calls, forms, bookings. The only number connected to money.
- • Where the enquiries came from, not where the visits came from. A source sending a hundred visits and no enquiries is worth less than one sending five and two calls.
- • Which pages people arrive on. Usually not your homepage, and it tells you which page deserves the work.
- • Whether the trend is up or down over months. Week-to-week movement is mostly noise.
What to stop looking at
Bounce rate is widely misunderstood and rarely actionable for a small site. Someone reading your opening hours and leaving satisfied is a bounce.
Time on page is unreliable, because the last page of a visit often records no duration at all. Raw visit counts flatter you without telling you anything — traffic that never enquires is a cost, not an achievement.
How much time this deserves
Twenty minutes a month is enough to see whether the trend is right and which page is doing the work. More than that, and you are researching rather than running the business.
The exception is anything that arrives without you going to look — an alert while someone is on the page is worth more than an hour with a dashboard afterwards, because you can still do something about it.
Find what is costing you search clicks, then watch the fix work.
VisitorPing reads your own Search Console data for the pages losing clicks, then rings your phone the moment someone lands on your website.