You have had Google Analytics installed for months. Maybe for years. You put it in because “you have to have it” and it's still there, collecting data that no one sees. Or worse: you open it from time to time, see a screen full of graphs, percentages and acronyms that you don't recognize, and you close it without getting anything clear. If this sounds familiar to you, you are no exception: it is what happens to the majority of SMEs and freelancers who manage their own website.
The problem is not that Analytics is complicated for the sake of it. It is designed to serve analysts at large companies with teams dedicated to looking at data eight hours a day. You don't need that. You need to answer three or four specific questions about your business, and the rest you can leave aside without regret.
Where do the visits that really bring you clients come from?
The important question is not “how many people visit my website?” It's “where do the people who buy, request a quote or call me come from?” It's not the same.
You can have traffic from social networks, from organic search on Google, from paid campaigns, from people who type your website directly because they already know you... and not all of these channels are worth the same. It is common for one channel to bring many visits but few contacts, and another to bring few visits but constant conversions.
To see it, you have to look at the acquisition report crossed with your conversions: forms submitted, calls, purchases, whatever you define as a goal in your business. If you don't have those goals set up, that's the first step before looking at anything else: without that, you're looking at traffic blindly.
An honest warning
If you've never set up conversions or events, everything else you read in this article is of little use. It is the basis on which the rest of the analysis is based.
What pages are making people leave
The second useful question is where people fall before converting. I'm not talking about the general bounce rate of the entire website—that's a vanity metric that we'll talk about later—but rather about specific pages in your funnel: if someone reaches your product or service page and leaves without taking the next step, there's something to review.
View the pages and screens report along with the behavior flow or breadcrumbs. Pay particular attention to pages where traffic enters with real intent (for example, from searches such as “service + city”) and where people leave without interacting. It usually means that the content does not answer what the person was looking for, that the call to action is not seen, or that the page takes a while to load and people get tired of waiting.
How long does it take for your website to load?
This is not within Analytics as such, but it is one of the metrics that has the most real weight and that fewer SMEs review. A slow website not only scares away visitors: Google penalizes it in positioning, and every second of waiting is an opportunity for the visitor to close the tab and go to the competition.
Use PageSpeed Insights or Search Console's Core Web Vitals report for this, not Analytics. They are separate tools but they complement each other: one tells you what is happening, the other tells you why they are leaving.
If you detect that speed is the problem, it is not always a question of “more hosting.” Sometimes it's a poorly configured plugin, unoptimized images, or a theme overloaded with features that you never use. Before spending more resources, it's worth reviewing what's really eating up that load time.
The metrics you can ignore without regret
And now the part that gives peace of mind: there are numbers in Analytics that you can stop looking at without your business suffering.
- Total visits without context. Whether they go up or down month by month doesn't tell you anything if you don't know where they come from and what those visitors do when they arrive. Ten visits that contact are worth more than a thousand that bounce.
- General bounce rate of the entire website. Mixing your home page with your blog and your contact sheet in a single figure is not useful for making decisions. Each type of page has a different and normal behavior.
- Average session duration as an objective in itself. People spending a lot of time on your website is not necessarily good: it can mean that they are interested, or that they can't find what they are looking for and keep wandering around.
- Comparisons with “the sector” without a reliable source. The generic figures that circulate about what is “normal” in your sector are usually of little use for your specific case; What is relevant is your own evolution over time.
None of these figures are completely useless, but if you pay more attention to them than the ones above, you are investing time in peace of mind and not in decisions.
What are you left with?
If you can only review your Analytics once a month, spend that time on three things: which channel brings in real contacts, which funnel pages lose people, and how fast your website loads on the devices your customer uses. The rest is interesting data, not decisions.
If you prefer that someone set up this monitoring for you—well-configured objectives, reports that answer these questions without you having to dig through menus—at Nooria we take care of leave your web analytics ready to make decisions, not just to accumulate data. And if what you need is a second look at a report that you already have set up but that no one knows how to interpret, we can also help you. put order in your business metrics.
Want to apply this in your business? Tell us about your case and we will reply within 24-48 working hours.