What you actually need
Five things, in order of importance:
1. Phone calls counted. Most service business enquiries are calls. Any setup that omits them is measuring the minority.
2. Form submissions counted correctly. Firing on submission, not on page load. Verified with a real enquiry.
3. Mobile phone taps tracked. Frequently missed, and for a local business that omission alone hides most enquiries.
4. Sources identified. Which channel each visit came from.
5. A record of what closed. Yours to keep — no platform has it, and without it nothing above connects to revenue.
That fifth item is the one that turns analytics from interesting into useful.
What you do not need
Heat maps, session recordings, funnel visualisations, custom dashboards, and most of what analytics tools market.
These are genuinely useful at volume. At a few hundred visits a month, they produce interesting pictures and no decisions, and the time spent looking at them is time not spent asking customers what nearly stopped them booking.
Choosing a platform
Most small businesses should use whatever is free and standard, correctly configured. The differences between platforms matter much less than configuration quality.
What to check:
- Does it integrate with your website without a project
- Can you get to the three numbers you care about in under a minute
- Does it work with your ad platform, if you run ads
- Will you actually open it
A platform nobody logs into is a line item, not a tool.
The setup errors that matter
Tracking installed twice. Everything doubles, and the numbers look encouraging for months.
Conversions firing on page load. Every visitor counts as a conversion.
Internal traffic not excluded. On a small site, staff visits can be a meaningful share.
UTM parameters on internal links. Restarts the session and erases the original source — the most damaging self-inflicted analytics error.
Nothing verified after setup. The most common of all.
The five-minute verification
Submit a real enquiry through your own site. Then call your own number from a mobile.
Check within a day that both appear, once each, in the right place.
Do it monthly. Tracking breaks silently — plugins update, keys expire — and the reports never stop looking plausible.
The privacy dimension
Analytics involves collecting data about visitors, and requirements vary by where those visitors are. What applies to your business is a legal question for an attorney rather than a marketing page.
A sound principle regardless: collect what you will act on and nothing else.
Where it sits
Basic analytics comes with Starter Presence — $2,500 setup, $750 a month, with conversion tracking and reporting from Growth Engine up.
Starting
Run the five-minute verification on what you have now. Whatever it shows is your starting point.
Frequently asked questions
What does a small business analytics setup need?
Phone calls counted, form submissions firing on submission rather than page load, mobile phone taps tracked, sources identified, and your own record of which enquiries closed.
What do I not need?
Heat maps, session recordings, funnel visualisations and custom dashboards. Useful at volume; at a few hundred visits a month they produce pictures rather than decisions.
What are the common setup errors?
Tracking installed twice, conversions firing on page load, internal traffic not excluded, UTM parameters on internal links, and nothing verified after setup.
How do I verify it works?
Submit a real enquiry and call your own number from a mobile, then check both appear once each in the right place within a day. Repeat monthly — tracking breaks silently.