32 out of 55 businesses I audited had Google Analytics installed on their website. Barely any of them were looking at the data.
I understand why. You log in, see a wall of numbers and graphs and think “I have no idea what any of this means.” So you close the tab and get on with your day. A week later you’ve forgotten it exists. Six months later you couldn’t find the login if you tried.
What you’re missing
When you don’t look at your data, you’re making every decision about your website, your marketing and your content based on gut feel rather than evidence.
You don’t know which pages people actually visit. You might assume your services page is the most important page on the site. The data might show that a blog post you wrote two years ago gets three times more traffic.
You don’t know where visitors come from. Are they finding you through Google? Social media? A directory listing you forgot about? The answer changes what you should be spending time on.
You don’t know where they leave. If 80% of your visitors leave from the homepage without clicking anything else, your homepage has a problem. If they’re leaving from the pricing page, that tells you something different.
You don’t know if anything you’re doing is working. Spent time on a social media campaign? Without analytics, you can’t tell whether it drove any traffic. Rewrote your homepage? Without data, you’re guessing whether it made a difference.
The Facebook ads lesson
One business I worked with was spending money on Facebook ads driving traffic to their homepage. When we looked at the analytics, the homepage had a bounce rate above 80%. People were arriving and immediately leaving. The page they should have been sending traffic to was buried three clicks deep in the navigation, but it had a conversion rate five times higher.
Without analytics, they’d have kept running those ads to the wrong page indefinitely. The ad spend wasn’t the problem. The landing page was. Ten minutes in Google Analytics revealed what months of ad spend had hidden.
The four things to check (ten minutes a month)
You don’t need to become a data analyst. You need to know four things. Check them once a month. It takes ten minutes.
How many people visited your site this month? Is the number going up, down or staying flat? A sudden drop means something changed (lost a search ranking, a link stopped working). A gradual increase means something is working. Log into Analytics, look at the Users number on the overview. That’s it.
Where did they come from? Under Acquisition in Analytics, look at your traffic sources. Organic search (Google), Direct (typed your URL), Social (Facebook, LinkedIn etc), Referral (other websites linking to you). If 90% is direct, you have an SEO problem because nobody is finding you through search. If social is zero, your social media isn’t driving any traffic.
Which pages did they look at? Under Behaviour, check your top pages. Are people looking at the pages you want them to? Is there a page getting unexpected traffic that you should be doing more with? Is there a page you spent time on that nobody visits?
Where did they leave? Look at exit pages and bounce rates. A high bounce rate on a blog post might be normal (people read it and leave). A high bounce rate on your homepage or a service page is a problem. It means people are arriving and deciding immediately that this isn’t what they wanted.
Set up one goal
The single most useful thing you can do in Google Analytics is set up a goal. A goal tracks when a visitor does the thing you actually want them to do: submits a contact form, clicks a phone number, completes a purchase.
Without goals, Analytics tells you how many people visited. With a goal, it tells you how many people did the thing that matters. The difference between “we had 500 visitors this month” and “we had 500 visitors and 12 of them sent an enquiry” is the difference between data and insight.
If you use Google Analytics 4, goals are now called Conversions. The setup takes about ten minutes. Search “GA4 set up conversions” and follow Google’s own guide. Once it’s done, you’ll see conversion data in every report, which changes how you think about everything else.
Just log in
If Google Analytics is installed on your website and you haven’t looked at it in six months, log in today. Just the overview page. The numbers might surprise you. That surprise is probably the most useful thing that will happen to your business this week.
This article is part of a series based on findings from 55 digital audits. Read the full case study for the complete picture, or get in touch if you’d like an honest look at where your business stands.