get in touchAre your website analytics telling the whole story?
Website analytics can give you a lot of numbers. Visitors, sessions, page views, engagement rates, conversions. You can compare this month with last month, this year with last year and, if you really want to ruin your afternoon, just keep adding date ranges.
But having more data doesn’t necessarily mean having more insight.
The numbers in your website reports are useful, but they rarely tell the whole story on their own. To understand whether your marketing is actually working, you need to know what those numbers represent, why they might have changed and, most importantly, whether that change matters to your business.
A number without context is just a number
Imagine your website traffic has dropped by 15% this month.
At first glance, that doesn’t sound particularly positive. But before deciding something has gone wrong, it’s worth looking a little closer.
Where has the traffic dropped from? Have enquiries changed too? Is it a seasonal fluctuation? Have you stopped a campaign that previously brought lots of visitors to the site? Has anything changed in the way your website is being tracked?
Perhaps traffic is down but enquiries are exactly the same. Or better still, you have fewer visitors but more of them are becoming customers.
Suddenly, that 15% drop looks quite different.
The same applies when the numbers go in the other direction. If website traffic increases by 30% but sales and enquiries stay exactly where they were, is that really something to celebrate?
Maybe. Maybe not.
This is why it’s important to look at website data alongside what you’re actually trying to achieve. For one business, that might be online sales. For another, it could be enquiries, phone calls or bookings. Traffic matters, but what happens as a result of that traffic can tell you far more.
Why the numbers don’t always match
There’s another complication, website traffic reporting platforms don’t all measure website activity in the same way.
Google Analytics is incredibly useful, but it isn’t a perfect headcount of everyone visiting your website. If someone doesn’t consent to analytics cookies, some of their activity may not appear in your Google Analytics reports.
That means you could be doing all the right things to bring relevant people to your website without seeing the full impact in Google Analytics.
This is one of the reasons we also use Plausible. It doesn’t use cookies, so it can give us another view of website traffic without relying on visitors accepting analytics cookies first.
Google Analytics can give us more detailed information about how people behave on a website, while Plausible gives us a simpler view of overall traffic. Looking at both helps us build a more useful picture of what is actually happening.
Making your data useful
You don’t need to become an analytics expert to get more value from your reporting.
The next time you look at your website data, start with three questions: What changed? Why might it have changed? And did it affect the outcome that actually matters to the business?
If your goal is to generate enquiries, make sure you’re measuring enquiries. If you want people to book appointments, look at bookings. If you’re selling online, look at purchases and revenue alongside website traffic.
It sounds obvious, but it’s very easy to end up reporting on the numbers that are easiest to measure rather than the ones that are actually useful.
With our clients, the first step is often working out which numbers are worth paying attention to and whether the right things are being tracked in the first place. That might mean reviewing the existing analytics setup, checking important actions are being recorded or simply cutting through a report that contains far more information than anyone actually needs.
A useful marketing report shouldn’t simply tell you what went up and what went down. It should help you understand why it happened, whether it matters and what you should do next.
Sometimes the tracking needs improving or the reporting needs simplifying. And sometimes all the information is already there, it just needs someone to make sense of it.
If your analytics are giving you plenty of numbers but not many useful answers, we can help you understand what’s being measured and focus your reporting on what actually matters to your business.
FAQs around website traffic.
Google Analytics is a useful tool, but it isn’t a perfect headcount of everyone who visits your website. Cookie consent, privacy settings and the way tracking has been configured can all affect the data available.
That doesn’t make the information useless, but it does mean the numbers need to be interpreted alongside the wider picture.
Google Analytics and Plausible measure website activity differently, so it’s normal for the figures not to match exactly. Google Analytics can use cookies to understand users and sessions, while Plausible works without cookies.
A difference between the two doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong. It means the platforms are measuring website activity differently.
It depends on what you want your website to achieve. Traffic and sessions are useful indicators, but they don’t necessarily tell you whether your marketing is generating results.
For most businesses, it’s important to also measure meaningful actions such as enquiries, purchases, bookings, phone calls or other conversions. The best metrics are the ones that help you understand whether your website is contributing to your wider business goals.
Start by asking whether you can measure the actions that actually matter to your business. If your website is designed to generate enquiries but your reporting doesn’t show when someone submits an enquiry form, for example, there’s an obvious gap.
An analytics audit can help identify what is and isn’t being tracked, check that your setup is working as expected and make sure your reports are giving you information you can actually use.
