What every small business owner needs to know about website analytics

Mark Twain popularized the saying in Chapters from My Autobiography, published in the North American Review in 1907. “Figures often beguile me,” Twain wrote, “particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'”

Why do you even need website analytics?

Your website is a business tool. You spend money, time, effort, and attention to creating and maintaining your website, all of which could easily have been put to work on other areas of your business. So like any other business tool, your website needs to prove its worth. That’s the value website analytics provides. Find out what webpages people are viewing, how people are getting to your website and what pages are helping drive leads. Make decisions based on data instead of a gut-feeling.

What should I be tracking?

When I first sat down to write this article, I started a list of key reports and features I think any small business owner should be tracking for their website. At first, I thought there would be 7 or 8 key reports, but the list kept growing even though it was my intention to keep things tight and lean.
Once my list got to 15 or 16 items, I figured it was time to find a way to logically group things, so I came up with this.

Essential Website Analytics Reports and Features for Small Business Websites

1. Traffic Volume Metrics

This is really the core data and will let you know how often people use your website. Trending this data is really important, especially if your business has a strong seasonality factor. Your Christmas tree lot might not have any visitors in July, but you better see things ramp up quickly in November.

• Number of website visitors (unique visitors)
• Number of visits (sessions)
• Page views

2. Traffic Source Analysis

This has always been one of my favorite report categories, learning how people find your website. I do a lot of local SEO work, so it is nice to see that pay off with organic search traffic. Anytime I work on a campaign to drive traffic to a website, I make sure to include UTM parameters whenever possible to understand how effect that campaign was. These reports can help you understand what works best for your business so you can focus your limited resources on what really brings in the leads.

• Traffic source categorization (Organic Search, Direct, Referral, Social Media, Email)
• Referring websites (specific URLs)
• UTM parameter tracking for campaigns

3. Content Performance & Visitor Engagement

These reports help you understand what content visitors are seeing, what content draws people in, and what content might actually be hurting your site due to high bounce rates. Even on a basic website, these reports can help you improve individual pages. But if you invest any effort at all into creating content for your website, these reports will be critical to making sure you’re creating the right content.

• Top pages by visits and visitors
• Top entry pages
• Top exit pages
• Bounce rate
• Average session duration
• Time on page

4. Audience Technical Data

From a web designer’s perspective, knowing the breakdown of mobile vs. desktop visitors is really helpful. Knowing your visitors’ location can also help you improve any marketing efforts, or find opportunities for new customers.

• Visitor location (country, state, city)
• Device type (mobile, desktop, tablet)
• Browser and operating system

5. Conversion & Goal Tracking

This requires some more advanced setup, but can yield some really helpful reports. Most small business have a website to drive leads, so you can create conversion events around form submissions, then see what parts of your website are the best and bringing in leads. Segments can also help you understand your potential clients a lot more by grouping visitors with similar behavior.

• Event tracking (form submissions, phone clicks, button clicks)
• Funnel analysis (multi-step conversion paths)
• Custom segments (filtered visitor groups)

6. Data Management & Reporting

Not really a report, but instead what you can do with your reports. Having the ability to compare date ranges helps you see trends, especially if your business has a strong seasonal component.

• Date range comparison
• CSV/Excel export capability

My history with website analytics systems

I’ve been dealing with website analytics for a very long time. I started off in the late 90’s and early 2000’s pulling log files off the server and parsing them with software called Sawmill. Later, I started using Urchin for log files and their new webpage tagging method for gathering data, which enabled a whole new range of analytics data. Google purchased Urchin in 2005 and turned it into Google Analytics.
During my time at Micron, we used a few high-end commercial web analytics systems. Our first system was Omniture, which was great. For me, our time with Omniture was peak web analytics. While not cheap, Omniture had great support, and was very customizable and easy to deploy. Because our team managed the design and deployment of the Omniture tags as well as the reporting side, we know how the data was gathered and fully understood what the reports meant.
Later, for a variety of reasons, we moved to Coremetrics, which had recently been acquired by IBM. The transition was a bit rough, as we were also moving the entire website over to IBM’s Websphere Commerce, which meant we had to rely on outside developers to deploy the tagging. We never did have much confidence in the data and reporting coming out of Coremetrics and struggled with customizing the tagging and reporting. A few years later, we moved back to Omniture, which by that time had been acquired by Adobe and, unfortunately, was a very different system that the one we’d left a few years earlier.
By now, you should notice a trend; a useful web analytics system rises to prominence, gets acquired by a corporate behemoth and then turns to poo. For the amount of money these systems cost, you’d hope for better, but it seems like the plan is to jam in more features in order to justify higher licensing costs. When I left Micron back in 2022, we were still struggling to get reliable data from our web analytics system, despite having thrown a lot of resources at it.

What options are there for small businesses?

So if a large tech company with fairly deep pockets and a team of developers and analysts can struggle to get a good website analytics system in place, what hope is there for a small business on a tight budget with limited resources? Surprisingly, there are actually a lot of really great options available for small business websites. First, you can avoid the trap of “enterprise” grade software, with the high costs and staggering amount of complexity that comes with these systems. There are several new web analytics systems available at a low cost that prioritize user privacy and a “back to basics” approach.
This new generation of website analytics systems all share some common characteristics:

• Cookie-less tracking to help you comply with GDPR and CCPA.
• Streamlined reporting interface to quickly surface the reports you need most.
• Smaller companies focused only on web analytics.
  Some offer open-source self-hosted options, but all have fully hosted subscription plans with simple and affordable pricing based on website traffic. Here are my 4 top choices based on cost, respect for user privacy, and reporting quality:
• Plausible: Minimalist interface, European privacy focus
• Matomo: Very feature-rich, closest GA4 alternative
• Rybbit: Ability to track Core Web Vitals, session replays, and error tracking
• Umami: Cleanest interface, easiest setup
  I’m currently using Umami, though I could easily use any of the other 3 and likely be quite happy with the results. I currently self-host Umami, and it addresses every essential report and feature I mentioned earlier. The analytics script has a very small impact on website performance, and it doesn’t force me to use a cookie banner. The reporting interface loads quickly, and the reports are easy to read and configure.

Why I almost always recommend Umami over GA4 and other options

Google Analytics holds a massive share of the web analytics market. If a website has any sort of web analytics system installed, 85-90% of the time it is GA4. It is free, and it has been free for a long time. And to be fair, GA4 is a very robust tool, especially when paired with Google Tag Manager. But I’ve been trying to like GA4 since around 2021 and I just can’t. Finding even basic reports is a chore. Something as fundamental as bounce rate was removed, and I still don’t trust the data I see in GA4. GA4’s free version uses heavy data sampling, and I suspect it is overly aggressive with bot mitigation (though I can’t prove that). When combined with the privacy problems and the fact that it is so frequently blocked, GA4 tends to significantly undercount traffic when compared to other options.
Beyond that, I find that most of the reports do a poor job of answering actual business questions. “Is my traffic growing?” “Which marketing is working?” “What content do people care about?” A good web analytics system should answer questions like that in just a few clicks. GA4 completely fails in that regard and must be paired with Google’s BigQuery and Looker Studio to be even halfway helpful, and even then I always found lingering doubts about the quality and accuracy of of the data presented.
In contrast, Umami keeps it simple and focuses on the key reports a small business needs, without having to dedicate hours of time integrating with other tools to produce useable reports. So unless there’s a specific need for GA4, such as enhanced Google Ads tracking, I can’t think of many good reasons to even consider GA4. Umami may carry a small monthly cost, but I’ve found you pay a pretty high price for the “free” GA4 in terms of time and effort.