Website Analytics Best Practices
Measure enquiries, not applause: events on the actions that pay, GA4 and Search Console linked, changes annotated, checked monthly.
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Max builds most of what you see on our sites, then makes sure Google can read it. He works in loops: build, test, pull it apart, build it better. His best fixes arrive out of nowhere, usually with the headphones on and something loud playing. Ask him which DJ set changed his life and clear your afternoon.
Read bio ↓Measure the actions that pay, ignore the applause
Most analytics setups measure attendance: visits, page views, time on site. Useful weather, but a business runs on actions, the form sent, the call tapped, the quote requested, the sale. The first principle contains most of the others: define the handful of actions that pay you, measure those properly, and treat everything else as context.
Track events, not just pages
Out of the box, analytics counts page loads. The valuable stuff is events: form submissions, phone number taps, calculator uses, video plays on the page that sells. GA4 is built around events and still won't know which ones matter to you until told, so mark your money actions as conversions and let every report pivot on them. Our setup guide walks through the buttons if you're starting fresh.
Link Search Console, halve your blindness
Analytics starts at the click. Search Console covers everything before it, the queries, the impressions, the pages Google can't index. Linked together they answer the questions each fumbles alone: not just "traffic fell" but "impressions held while clicks fell, so it's the titles, not the rankings". Two free tools, one connection, and most businesses never make it.
Annotate or forget
Numbers without context breed myths. Keep a dated log of every change that could move the graphs: site edits, campaigns, price changes, the week your whole industry went quiet. Six months later, when someone asks why March dipped, the log answers in seconds what memory will confidently answer wrong.
A monthly rhythm, not a daily vigil
Daily checking teaches you to panic at noise, and small sites wobble for no reason at all. A monthly session with the same short list, enquiries, their sources, the top pages, search impressions and CTR, compared against last month and last year, catches every trend that matters. Concession for the impatient: after a launch or a big change, watch the week. Then go back to monthly.
End every look with a change
Analytics that produces reports and no decisions is a hobby. Close each session by writing one sentence: what we'll do differently because of this. Sometimes it's "nothing, hold course", which is a decision too.
The stack can stay small: GA4 for behaviour, Search Console for search, a spreadsheet for the log. Sophistication in analytics is mostly discipline wearing a lanyard.
Written by
Maximillian Giddens
Max builds most of what you see on our sites, then makes sure Google can read it. He works in loops: build, test, pull it apart, build it better. His best fixes arrive out of nowhere, usually with the headphones on and something loud playing. Ask him which DJ set changed his life and clear your afternoon.
