Most small business owners we speak to have Google Analytics on their website. Far fewer trust what it tells them. Usually the account was set up years ago by whoever built the site, nobody has logged in since, and when someone finally does, the numbers don’t line up with the phone ringing or the orders coming in.
That’s a shame, because GA4 is free and, set up properly, it answers the questions that actually matter to a small business. Where are my enquiries coming from? Is my ad spend paying for itself? Which pages bring people in, and which ones send them away? Below is how we set it up for small businesses across Leicestershire.
Start with the basics in your property settings
If you still have an old Universal Analytics account sitting in your Google login, ignore it. Google stopped processing data in standard Universal Analytics properties in July 2023, so GA4 is the only version that’s collecting anything now.
Once your GA4 property and web data stream exist, there are a handful of admin settings worth changing before you look at a single report. The first is data retention. By default, GA4 keeps user-level and event-level data for just two months, which means any exploration report you build will only look back that far. In Admin, find Data retention under your property’s data settings and change it to 14 months. It takes a minute and it applies to data you’ve already collected, as long as it hasn’t been deleted yet. Your standard reports aren’t affected either way, but explorations are where much of the useful digging happens.
Next, filter out your own traffic. If you, your staff and your web developer visit the site every day, you’re inflating your visitor numbers and dragging down your conversion rate. GA4 lets you define internal traffic by IP address in your data stream settings and then switch on a filter to exclude it. Set the filter to testing first, check it’s behaving, then make it active. Active filters permanently exclude data, so it’s worth getting right.
If you run Google Ads, link the two accounts. It takes a couple of minutes under Product links and means you can see what people from your ads actually did on the site, not just what they clicked.
Check what enhanced measurement already covers
One of the better things about GA4 is that it tracks a fair amount without any extra work. Enhanced measurement, which you switch on in your web data stream settings, records page views, scrolls (when someone reaches 90% of the way down a page), outbound link clicks, site searches, engagement with embedded YouTube videos that support it, file downloads and form interactions.
That’s a solid foundation, but it’s worth knowing its limits. The form interaction tracking in particular is patchy. It fires when someone first interacts with a form and when GA4 thinks a form has been submitted, but depending on how your forms are built, it can miss submissions or count ones that failed. For a small business where a form fill might be worth hundreds or thousands of pounds, “probably” isn’t good enough.
Decide which actions count as a win
This is where most accounts fall down. GA4 calls the actions that matter to your business key events (they used to be called conversions, so you’ll still see both terms floating around). Until you mark something as a key event, GA4 has no idea what success looks like for you, and your reports will be full of traffic figures with nothing to measure them against.
For a service business, the key events are usually enquiry form submissions, clicks on your phone number, clicks on your email address and, if you use them, quote requests or booking confirmations. For an ecommerce business, purchases come first, and GA4’s recommended ecommerce events such as add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase will let you see where people drop out on the way to buying. Most ecommerce platforms, Shopify and WooCommerce included, can send these events for you with the right integration.
The most reliable way to track a form submission is to fire an event when the thank-you page or confirmation message appears, rather than when someone clicks the submit button. Clicks happen even when a form throws an error. Phone and email clicks are best tracked through Google Tag Manager, which lets you fire an event whenever someone taps a tel: or mailto: link. Once the event is coming through, you can mark it as a key event by clicking the star next to it in Admin, under Data display and then Events. GA4 already treats purchase as a key event by default.
Keep the list short. We regularly see accounts where page views, scrolls and every button click have been marked as key events, which makes the figure meaningless. If it wouldn’t make you happy to see it in your inbox, it probably isn’t a key event.
The reports worth your time
GA4 has a lot of reports, and the default interface doesn’t do a great job of pointing you to the useful ones. For most small businesses, three areas cover nearly everything.
The Traffic acquisition report, under Reports and then Acquisition, shows where your visitors came from by channel: organic search, paid search, social, referral, direct and so on. Add your key events as a column and you’ll quickly see which channels bring people who actually enquire or buy, which matters far more than which brings the most visitors. A channel with a tenth of the traffic but half of the enquiries deserves more attention, not less.
The Pages and screens report, under Engagement, shows your most visited pages. Look at it alongside the Landing page report, which tells you where people first arrive. If a service page gets plenty of visits but almost no enquiries, that’s a page worth reworking. We’ve written more about this in our guide to fixing what’s blocking website conversions.
The Key events report shows how many of each key event happened and when. It’s the simplest way to keep an eye on lead volume week to week, and it’s the first place to look if enquiries suddenly dry up, because a sharp drop to zero usually means tracking has broken rather than demand has vanished.
Common mistakes we see
The most common problem by far is tracking that has quietly broken. A website redesign, a new form plugin or a cookie banner change can stop events firing, and nobody notices for months. It’s worth checking your key events at least monthly, and testing them yourself after any change to the site. GA4’s DebugView, under Admin and then Data display, shows events as they come in, which makes testing much easier.
Duplicate tracking is a close second. If the GA4 tag is installed directly on the site and through Google Tag Manager, or through a plugin as well as the theme, every page view gets counted twice. A suspiciously low bounce rate or a session count that doubled overnight is often the giveaway.
Consent is the third. Under UK GDPR and PECR, you generally need consent before setting analytics cookies, and if your cookie banner isn’t connected to GA4 properly, you’re either collecting data you shouldn’t be or losing data you could be collecting. Google’s consent mode lets your tags adjust their behaviour based on whether someone has accepted cookies. It’s worth getting your cookie banner and GA4 talking to each other properly rather than assuming they are.
Finally, expect GA4 to disagree with other platforms. Google Ads, Meta and your CRM all count things differently and attribute credit differently, so the numbers won’t match exactly. Pick one source of truth for each question and stick to it, rather than chasing a perfect match.
When it’s worth getting help
Plenty of small businesses can handle the setup above themselves, especially with a simple brochure site and a single contact form. It’s worth bringing someone in when the stakes are higher: when you’re spending real money on Google Ads and need to know what it’s returning, when you run an online shop with a proper checkout to track, when you’ve just relaunched your website, or when the numbers simply don’t make sense and you can’t work out why.
An analytics audit doesn’t need to be a big project. Often it’s a few hours of checking what’s firing, fixing what isn’t and setting up a simple report you’ll actually look at. If you’re already spending on ads, our guide to how much Google Ads costs in the UK explains why accurate tracking makes such a difference to what you get back.
At Foundry, analytics sits at the heart of the SEO, paid ads and conversion work we do for businesses in Leicester, Melton Mowbray and across the East Midlands, because there’s little point improving something you can’t measure. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your GA4 setup, take a look at our technical SEO services or get in touch for a chat.