Most small businesses either track nothing or track everything and understand none of it. Marketing analytics doesn’t need to be complicated. You need to know a handful of numbers: where customers come from, which pages turn visitors into leads, and which channels are worth the money.
This guide covers what to track for your website, social media and advertising, the free tools that do it, and a simple monthly routine.
Start with the one number that matters
Before looking at any dashboard, decide what a “result” is for your business. For most it’s one of these:
- A phone call
- A contact or quote form submission
- A booking
- A purchase
Everything else, such as visitors, likes and impressions, only matters if it leads to that result. Set it up as a conversion (Google Analytics calls them “key events”) so you can see which channels produce it.
Website marketing analytics
Google Analytics 4
Free and the standard tool for website data. The reports worth checking:
- Traffic acquisition: where visitors come from, such as Google search, social media, ads, email or direct.
- Landing pages: which pages people arrive on, and which of them lead to enquiries.
- Key events: form submissions, calls, bookings and purchases, broken down by channel.
- Device: how mobile and desktop compare. If mobile converts much worse, your mobile site needs work.
Google Search Console
Also free. It shows how your site appears in Google: which searches you show up for, your average position, impressions and clicks. Two things to check monthly:
- Queries where you rank in positions 8 to 20. Small improvements to those pages can move you onto page one.
- Pages with many impressions but a low click-through rate. Better titles and descriptions can lift clicks without any change in ranking.
Behaviour tools
Microsoft Clarity (free) and Hotjar show heatmaps and session recordings, so you can see where visitors click, scroll and get stuck.
Social media marketing analytics
Each platform has its own built-in analytics: Meta Business Suite for Facebook and Instagram, TikTok analytics, and LinkedIn page analytics. Focus on:
- Reach and saves/shares: whether content is getting in front of new people and being valued.
- Profile visits and link clicks: whether interest turns into action.
- Website sessions and conversions from social: measured in Google Analytics, not in the app.
Follower count on its own is a vanity number. A small, engaged audience that clicks through beats a big audience that never does. See more in ecommerce and social media marketing.
Advertising analytics
Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager have detailed reporting. The numbers that matter most:
- Cost per lead or cost per purchase: what you pay for each result.
- Conversion rate: the share of clicks that become results.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): for online stores, revenue divided by ad cost.
- Search terms: in Google Ads, the actual searches that triggered your ads. Add irrelevant ones as negative keywords.
Make sure conversion tracking is set up correctly first. Without it, ad platforms optimise for the wrong thing.
Connect it all with UTM links
UTM tags are short labels added to a link, such as ?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=spring_sale. They tell Google Analytics exactly where a visitor came from. Use them on every link in social posts, bios, emails and partner sites. Google’s free Campaign URL Builder creates them for you.
Put it on one dashboard
Looker Studio (free from Google) can pull Google Analytics, Search Console and Google Ads into a single dashboard. One page with leads by channel, top landing pages, search performance and ad cost per lead is enough for most small businesses.
A 30-minute monthly routine
- Total leads or sales this month versus last month.
- Leads by channel: search, social, ads, email, referral.
- Top five landing pages, and their conversion rates.
- Search Console: queries in positions 8–20, and pages with low click-through rates.
- Ads: cost per lead and wasted search terms.
- Pick one thing to improve next month.
The last step matters most. Analytics is only useful if it changes what you do.
Common mistakes
- No conversion tracking, so you can’t tell which channel brings customers.
- Judging social media by likes instead of leads.
- Trusting ad platform numbers without checking them against real sales.
- Checking stats daily and reacting to normal ups and downs.
Need help setting it up?
Every website we build includes Google Analytics and Search Console from day one, and our SEO, Google Ads and social media clients get plain-language monthly reports. Get in touch if you’d like help with yours.
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