A Beginner’s Guide to Website Analytics

By Mark Harbeke, Owner, Harbeke Marketing

 

If you’re like most small business owners — especially if you’re a first-time owner — you’re running your website on one of the big platforms like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify.

You know how well you’re doing for sales, and you can probably name off the top of your head your top three sources for customer or client leads.

But do you have a pulse on your website data beyond a few high-level key performance indicators (KPIs)?

For business owners in any industry, it’s important to keep tabs on a small, key set of website metrics. Here’s what I recommend you focus on and why:

1. Search Keywords: While many businesses focus on search engine optimization (SEO) at one point or another, this report shows how well your site performs in actual search queries. The data can reveal opportunities to refine or expand content to better match popular search terms over time.
2. Traffic Sources: Understanding where your visitors are coming from is essential, especially as you diversify your marketing channels. This metric helps you gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns and ROI. Traffic sources can include direct visits, email, social media, search engines, referrals, and paid sources like Google Ads.
3. Unique Visits: This metric shows the number of individual users landing on your site, which is more crucial than tracking sessions since one person can initiate multiple sessions. Monitoring unique visits provides a clear picture of your actual audience.
4. Pages: This section reveals the most popular pages on your site based on unique visits, views, and users. If a high-revenue page has low traffic, it might indicate a need to improve content that resonates with your target audience. The name of this section may vary depending on your analytics platform — it could be listed as Pages and Screens or Landing Pages.
5. Geography: For those targeting U.S.-based customers, this section lets you see which states and cities generate the most traffic. If you’re working on local SEO or marketing to multiple countries, this data helps assess the effectiveness of your efforts and campaigns.

If you have additional bandwidth, the next metrics to prioritize are Devices and Bounce Rate. When it comes to devices, your website developer should be savvy enough to create and maintain a fully responsive website that looks great whether it’s viewed on a desktop or laptop computer, a phone, or a tablet. This means that your view numbers broken down by these three device types should be roughly even, with tablets potentially showing up noticeably lower in the percentage because they tend to be used a lot less than other devices.

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your page shortly after arriving. This metric reflects how well your content meets the expectations of your audience. A bounce rate above 40% suggests it might be time to revisit your strategy with your marketing agency or team to improve engagement.

Where to View Your Website Data

While your website platform likely comes with a built-in Analytics dashboard, I recommend that you create a property (account) for your business on Google Analytics. The current version of Google Analytics is known as GA4 and website analytics properties are free to set up on it.

There are two main reasons to favor the data coming in to GA4 over your website platform. The first is that many website platforms evaluate Visits, but not Unique Visits. The second is that these platforms also tend to not include the ability to filter out the IP addresses of you and your employees and/or contractors who are checking and updating your website. This is important because “internal” visits can skew your actual customer or client data, especially if your business is newer and has a low overall unique visitor count. GA4 includes this filter function.

Where Customers and Clients Come From, and What That Says About How Your Brand Shows Up On Platforms

Over time, you want your traffic sources (see #2 from the list above) to reflect the top platforms where you share your message and offers with the audiences you are courting. For example, here are the top sources for my company over the past year:

 

The two biggest segments – Email and Direct traffic, together making up over 83% of new users of my website – represent another facet of this conversation: your numbers per platform (or marketing channel) should be in line with the number of posts or outreach “pings” that you send per platform or channel. In my case, for the past 6+ months I’ve used virtual networking events as the main channel to drive one-on-one call bookings on my calendar. Within the channel of virtual networking events, email is the primary way that I reach out to event attendees I click with, and when leads visit my website from the emails I send, they show up as an Email lead in my analytics data. (And the Direct segment is also huge because event attendees type my website into their browser when I tell attendees about my company. This segment also captures leads who type my website into their browser when I’m on one-on-one calls with them.)

Additional platform considerations include:

• Google and other search engines: As a marketing friend of mine who builds custom responsive websites for his clients recently shared on LinkedIn, businesses should be intentional in their website marketing strategy when it comes to updating and/or adding new pages. This is because with each page addition and page update, Google and other search engines recrawl your website. This recrawl is a good thing because, when businesses are smart about the search keywords (see metric #1 in the list above) they incorporate that align with their target audience’s search terms, they have the chance to rank higher in search results for one or more keywords. Therefore, adding new pages and updating existing pages that address your customer or client’s top pain points helps to grow your share of traffic from this platform over time…leading to more instances of “selling while you sleep,” which is what all entrepreneurs dream of. And speaking of adding new pages, adding a blog to your website if you don’t have one – and building into your strategy the time and manpower to post on a regular basis – is a proven way to generate more visits from search engines over time, as well as boost your ROI from website design and development.
• Referral traffic: When businesses start out, this can be a bit of a “pleasant surprise” platform. Websites you’ve never heard of, that often deploy bots to scrape page data and share it their visitors, will start sending you visitors. However, if you have no relationship with a referral site, then traffic coming from them will tend to be low quality – meaning these visitors are unlikely leads for you because there’s no connection between the site sending you visits and what you offer. By contrast, if you enter into affiliate or referral arrangements with websites whose traffic aligns with your audiences, then this platform can align more and more with your brand over time.

Conclusion

Analytics can sound boring and seem daunting to small business owners. But it doesn’t have to be either. If you start small, with a list of metrics that you work backward from your sales volume (and top products or services) and the list of top referral sources with which you’re already familiar, you can quickly get a handle on which additional metrics and platforms matter most for your industry and your particular business goals.

If you’re totally new to analytics, my advice is to get set up for free on Google Analytics 4. Once data starts to populate in your GA4 property, start reviewing the different sections and see which ones best reflect where you are and where you want to get to. (One final related tip: In the Reports area, if you’ve customized a report to your liking, you can save it to your Library. This allows you to quickly pull it up again in the future with one click.)

Mark Harbeke is Owner of Harbeke Marketing. He improves small businesses’ website conversion tracking and works primarily with clients of marketing agencies and fractional CMOs. Read his client case studies here.