Website analytics for people who do not care about analytics

Most small business owners have analytics installed and have never opened it, or opened it once, found forty reports about things like engaged sessions per user, and closed it again. That is a rational response to a tool built for e-commerce teams.

But three numbers genuinely matter, and getting to them takes about ninety minutes to set up and five minutes a month to read.

The two tools and what each answers

Step 1: install Google Analytics 4

1. 01Create the account and propertyAt analytics.google.com, create an account for the business, then a property for the website. Set the time zone to Eastern Time and the currency to Canadian dollars — get these right at creation, because changing them later does not fix historical data.
2. 02Create a web data streamEnter your site URL. You will be given a Measurement ID that looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX.
3. 03Install the tagMost platforms have a field for the Measurement ID. If yours does not, paste the gtag snippet into the site's head. Ask whoever maintains the site if you are unsure — this is a five-minute job, not a project.
4. 04Verify it is workingOpen the Realtime report and visit your own site from your phone. You should appear within seconds. If nothing appears, the tag is not installed on that page — check that it is on the template, not just the home page.
5. 05Filter out your own trafficIn Admin → Data Streams → Configure tag settings → Define internal traffic, add your office IP address, then activate the Internal Traffic filter. Otherwise your own visits distort a small site's numbers substantially.

Step 2: verify Search Console

1. 01Add a Domain propertyAt search.google.com/search-console, choose the Domain option rather than URL prefix. It covers http, https, www and non-www in one property, which avoids the classic problem of collecting data on a version of your site nobody uses.
2. 02Verify via DNSYou will be given a TXT record to add at your registrar. If DNS access is genuinely unavailable, use the URL prefix option and the HTML tag method instead.
3. 03Submit your sitemapUnder Sitemaps, submit /sitemap.xml. This is how Google finds all your pages rather than only the ones it stumbles across.
4. 04Link it to AnalyticsIn GA4's Admin, link the Search Console property. Search query data then appears alongside your behaviour data.

Step 3: track what actually matters

Traffic is not a business metric. Enquiries are. Configure these as conversion events, or your analytics only ever tells you how many strangers walked past the window.

• Form submission. The single most important event. Ideally fired on a distinct thank-you page, which is the easiest reliable trigger.
• Phone click. A click on a tel: link. On mobile this is often your highest-volume conversion.
• Email click. A click on a mailto: link, if you publish an address.
• Booking click. If you send people to a scheduling tool.
• Directions click. If customers visit you.

In GA4, mark each one as a key event under Admin → Events. If a thank-you page exists, the form conversion can be configured with no code at all — one more reason to send successful submissions to a real /thanks page rather than swapping the form for a message in place.

Step 4: the five-minute monthly review

Once a month, on the first Monday. Five minutes, four questions, written in a note so you can compare next month.

1. How many enquiries? GA4 → Reports → Engagement → Events, filtered to your key events. Compare to the same month last year, not to last month — almost every local business is seasonal, and month-on-month comparisons mostly measure the weather.
2. Where did they come from? Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition. You are looking for the balance between organic search, direct, referral and social. A sudden shift in the mix is worth understanding.
3. Which pages did the work? Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens. Usually two or three pages produce most of the value, which tells you where to spend your next hour.
4. What are people searching? Search Console → Performance. Sort by impressions and look for queries in positions 8–20 — those are the near-misses worth one improvement each.

What to ignore

• Bounce rate and engagement rate. On a local service site, someone who reads your hours and phones you is recorded as a poor session. That is a successful visit.
• Average session duration. Longer is not better. Someone finding your price in eight seconds is a good outcome.
• Daily numbers. A small site's daily traffic is noise. Look monthly.
• Vanity totals. Total users means nothing without knowing how many enquired.
• Real-time, except for testing. It is compelling and tells you nothing.

The alternative worth knowing about

If GA4 feels like more tool than you need, cookieless analytics tools such as Plausible or Fathom show visitors, sources, top pages and conversions on a single screen for a few dollars a month. They collect far less personal data, which simplifies your privacy position, and for most local businesses they answer every question you will actually ask. Search Console is still worth having alongside either choice, because nothing else provides query data.