Analytics
What is analytics?
Analytics is the work of collecting, measuring and reading the data a digital effort produces: who arrived, from where, what they did and what it cost. Its value is not the dashboard but the decision that follows — which campaign to keep funding, which page to rewrite, which channel to stop paying for.
What to measure
- Where people come from: search, ads, social media, email, other sites, marked with UTM parameters where links are your own.
- What they do: the pages they read, the searches on the site, where they stop.
- What counts as a result: orders, enquiries, calls, sign-ups, each recorded as a conversion. See conversion tracking.
- What it costs: spend by channel and campaign, so each result has a price.
The usual tools are Google Analytics 4, Search Console, the ad platforms’ own reports and the shop’s or CRM’s sales data. In the EU, most of it may run only after the visitor’s consent, which is why consent mode and honest banners matter for data quality.
Example
A tile shop spends €3,000 a month on Google and Facebook ads. Each platform reports its own success: Google claims 60 sales, Facebook 45, while the shop recorded 70 orders in total. Nobody knows which channel to cut.
The shop sets up GA4 with the order value on each purchase, UTM tags on every ad, and a weekly table that joins ad spend with orders from the shop system. It turns out that Facebook brings first visits but rarely the sale, while Google search closes most orders, and that one Facebook campaign brings nothing at all. The shop switches it off, moves €600 a month to search and keeps the rest of Facebook for reach. Orders rise to 84 with the same budget.
Why it matters for a business
Analytics is worth what the decisions it leads to are worth: which campaign to keep funding, which page to rewrite, which channel to stop paying for. A dashboard nobody acts on is a cost. The useful report is short, ties spend to results, and ends with what to do next.
It is also only as good as the data beneath it. Missing consent, broken tags, a form that records no conversion, or ad platforms that each count the same sale make the numbers confident and wrong. Checking the data against the shop’s or the CRM’s own records is the first step of any analysis.
What to ask
- Do our analytics record every result that matters, with its value?
- Do the conversions in our reports match the orders and enquiries we actually received?
- Can we see the cost of a result by channel, not only the clicks?
- Which decision did our last report lead to?
Analysis is only as good as the data beneath it. Where standard reports are not enough we build our own dashboards and tracking in our web software work, and the decisions they lead to go into our digital marketing.