Is your marketing plan and any advertising spend linked to your website analytics? Do you know what your website analytics tools could be telling you about your website and your customers?
If the answer to either of these is no, or if you’re just starting out at the beginning of your analytics journey then this guide is for you.
The tools you need. There are a huge number of tools out there, for ease and because they’re the basics we believe all businesses should have set up first (and they’re free and straightforward to set up) we will be focusing on Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Search Console (GSC) and Microsoft Clarity.
When these are first set up they can look overwhelming. To get the best out of them though you do not need to set up lots of fancy reports and dashboards highlighting every number these tools are capable of producing. What you need is to spend some time thinking about your business and what you need to know to grow so you can determine the handful of metrics that will actually tell you something useful, giving you the confidence to ignore the rest.
The metrics worth your time
It goes without saying every organisation is going to have different priorities, across sectors and business size however, these are the metrics pretty much no-one can do without, and why.
- Key events (conversions). This is the one that matters more than all the others combined. Key events refers to the specific actions you need / want people to take on your website, whether that’sĀ an enquiry form submitted, a call button tapped, a brochure downloaded, or a newsletter signup. Everything else on this list is really just context for this one. If you only ever check one thing, check and track this.
- Engaged sessions. This is GA4’s replacement for the old “bounce rate”. It tells you what share of visits involved someone actually doing something (staying a reasonable length of time, viewing more than one page, or triggering a conversion), rather than just landing and leaving. This allows you to start diagnosing possible problems. For example, a page with lots of visits, but a low engagement rate usually means the page isn’t delivering what people expected when they clicked through to it. Knowing this gives you the power to start implementing and testing out fixes.
- Where your traffic comes from. Search, paid ads, social, referrals, direct. Knowing the split between them tells you what’s really leading people to you, rather than just that “something” is. A jump in visits from one channel might mean it’s worth redirecting some of your marketing efforts into it; whereas a channel that never sends meaningful numbers to you is worth questioning before you spend more on it.
- Your top landing pages, and what happens after. Knowing the pages people arrive on is useful, but matters less on its own than what they do next. A page bringing in plenty of visits but no conversions is telling you something specific, which might be that the content doesn’t match what the visitor was expecting, or the next step for them to take isn’t clear enough.
- Where people drop off. If you have a multi-step process, by which we mean an enquiry form, or a booking flow, or a checkout then knowing which step loses people is one of the most directly actionable things analytics can tell you. It points at exactly what to fix, rather than a vague sense that “conversions could be better.”
What you can mostly stop worrying about
Total visits or pageviews, on their own, tell you very little. The numbers can go up while nothing meaningful changes for your business, and they can look flat while your best traffic quietly grows underneath it. The same goes for session count if you don’t understand where those sessions came from, and average time on site as a single site-wide figure rather page by page. None of these are meaningless, but none of them deserve to be the headline number you check first.
| Instead of relying onā¦ | which can mislead you becauseā¦ | Check this instead | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total pageviews | High numbers can hide bot traffic, or people landing and leaving immediately | Engaged sessions | Check the time visitors are staying for, if they’re viewing more than one page and read next to key event rate |
| Bounce rate | It treats a successful single-page visit (someone who got their answer and left) the same as a failed one | Key event rate | Track the specific action you want, not just whether someone viewed a second page |
| Average session duration (site-wide) | People who open a tab and walk away skew it | Landing page drop-off | Look at where people leave a process, not a blended average across the whole site |
| A traffic spike on its own | Doesn’t tell you if it’s genuine interest or referral spam / bot activity | Traffic source for that spike | Check where it actually came from before reacting to it either way |
If you want to dig into whether your traffic numbers can even be trusted in the first place or are being impacted by sudden spikes, or bot traffic, or you’ve numbers that don’t match what’s happening in your business then we’ve written about different types of traffic here.
This piece assumes your numbers are broadly real and asks a different question: given that, what should you actually be looking at?
Quick diagnosis: website analytics & business impact
Once you know what to check, the next question is usually “okay, so what does that mean?” A few common patterns:
| What you’re seeing | Likely cause | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| High traffic, low engagement | A mismatch between what brought people to the page (an ad, a search result) and what they find there | Revisit the headline and the first thing visitors see ā> does it match what they expected? |
| Good engagement, but few key events | People are reading or browsing, but something is stopping them at the final step | Audit the enquiry form or checkout itself, check the field count, for unclear labels, a broken link etc. |
| A sudden spike but no change in key events | Often referral spam or bot activity rather than genuine interest | Check the traffic source before reacting, see the traffic-trust piece above |
| Steady traffic, gradually declining key events | The page or offer has gone stale, even if nothing on it was actually changed | Worth a fresh look at whether the content and call to action still match what visitors want |
This isn’t exhaustive, real situations are usually messier than a table, but it’s a reasonable first place to look before assuming the worst or the best.
For example, imagine a blog post suddenly picks up a wave of new visitors in a short period of time, but enquiries don’t move at all. That’s the “sudden spike, no change in key events” row above. Checking the traffic source shows most of it arrived from a single referring site, and a quick look at session recordings shows people landing, glancing around for a few seconds, and leaving. That combination ā one concentrated source, near-zero engagement ā is a reasonable sign this is low-intent or bot traffic rather than real interest, and not something worth chasing or reacting to.
Beyond the numbers: watching what people actually do
Numbers tell you that something’s happening for example, a page underperforming, a step losing people, but not always why. Free tools like Microsoft Clarity, which we use ourselves, record anonymised sessions and build heatmaps so you can watch how visitors actually move through a page: where they hesitate, what they ignore, where they give up. It’s a useful complement to GA4’s numbers, not a replacement for them; the numbers tell you where to look, the recordings show you what’s actually going wrong there.
Do your website numbers raise more questions than answers?
Good analytics should make your website’s performance clearer, not murkier. If you’re checking the metrics above and still aren’t sure what they’re telling you, or if you can see something’s off but not why then that’s usually a sign it’s worth a second pair of eyes rather than more time staring at the dashboard.
That’s part of what we mean by a website partner rather than a one-off delivery: we don’t disappear once your site is live. If you’d like a hand making sense of what your analytics are actually telling you, get in touch, or read more about what to expect when you commission a website if you’re earlier in the process and want to know what ongoing support usually looks like.
