The four numbers worth watching, and everything you can ignore

Not "sessions" or "users" as a single blob — the split by channel. Search, social, direct, referral.

This one number tells you which of your efforts is working. If you have spent six months on Instagram and social is 4% of arrivals while search is 70%, you have learned something expensive and useful.

Watch it monthly, not daily. Daily numbers are noise.

Pick the single action that matters — an enquiry, a booking, a call, a purchase — and track the percentage of visitors who complete it.

This is the only number that connects your website to your bank account. Traffic without conversion is a busier waiting room, not more customers.

A useful reference: 1–3% is normal for a small business site. Under 0.5% means something is broken — often the form, sometimes the price, sometimes that the page never says what you actually do.

Doubling your traffic is hard and expensive. Doubling your conversion rate is usually a week of unglamorous fixes, and it does the same thing to revenue.

Not your most-visited pages — your most common entry pages. These are where strangers meet you, and they are frequently not the homepage.

If a particular article or service page brings a third of your search traffic, that page deserves attention out of all proportion to the rest of the site. Make sure it says who you are and offers an obvious next step. Most such pages do neither, because they were written as an afterthought.

If you have any multi-step flow — a form, a checkout, a booking — you need to know which step loses people.

The pattern is almost always the same: one step is doing the damage. Asking for a phone number. Forcing account creation. A delivery cost that appears at the end. Fix that step and the whole flow improves.

For a single-page form, the equivalent is: how many people start typing versus how many submit.

Bounce rate. It is badly defined and easy to misread. Someone reading your opening hours and leaving satisfied is a "bounce". It is not a failure.

Time on page. Measured unreliably, and a longer time can mean engaged or confused. It rarely tells you which.

Raw pageviews. Vanity. Ten thousand visitors who never contact you are worth less than two hundred who do.

Anything you cannot act on. If a number goes up and you have no idea what to do differently, stop looking at it.

Use something simple. Google Analytics 4 is powerful and genuinely hostile to casual use. Plausible, Fathom or Simple Analytics show you the four things above on one screen, do not need a cookie banner in most jurisdictions, and cost a few pounds a month. For most small businesses they are strictly better.

Track the one event that matters. Not fifty. One: the enquiry, the booking, the call. Get that one right and the second number above is answered.

Add Google Search Console. Free, separate from analytics, and the only place you see what people typed to find you. That list of search terms is the most directly useful data most small businesses have access to and most never look at it.

Look monthly. Put it in the calendar. Fifteen minutes, four numbers, one decision. That is a functioning measurement habit, and it beats an elaborate dashboard nobody opens.