Analytics and Measurement

The question most sites cannot answer

"How many enquiries did we get last month, from which channel, and how many became work?" It sounds basic. In practice most businesses can produce a session count and nothing else, which is the least useful number available.

Sessions do not pay wages. Until measurement connects marketing activity to enquiries and enquiries to revenue, every budget decision is made on instinct — and usually in favour of whichever channel has the most enthusiastic supplier.

GA4, honestly

The move from Universal Analytics was not smooth and many businesses have a GA4 property that was auto-migrated, never configured, and has been quietly producing wrong numbers since.

The common faults: conversions counted on page views rather than genuine form submissions, internal traffic never excluded so the team's own visits inflate everything, no cross-domain setup where a booking system sits on another domain, and referral exclusions missing so a payment provider gets credited for sales search actually produced.

Each of these makes reporting confidently wrong, which is worse than having no reporting — a business acting on bad data makes worse decisions than one acting on none.

Calls are where attribution breaks

For trades, professional services and healthcare, the phone is the main route and it is invisible by default. A business can conclude search is not working while search is generating most of its calls.

Call tracking fixes it: a number that changes based on how the visitor arrived, so a call can be attributed to a channel and a landing page. It needs setting up carefully — the number must stay consistent for your Google Business Profile, or you create the citation inconsistency that harms local rankings.

What we do

• GA4 audit and reconfiguration, including the migration faults above
• Conversion and event tracking on the actions that matter
• Call tracking, configured without breaking local citations
• Cross-domain and subdomain measurement
• Consent-compliant tagging under UK GDPR and PECR
• Reporting built around your commercial questions, not the default dashboards
• Documentation so your team can maintain it

Consent, and measuring within it

UK GDPR and PECR require consent for analytics cookies, and a properly implemented banner means some visitors are not measured. That is the law, not a problem to engineer around.

What it does mean is understanding your data is a sample rather than a census, and setting reporting expectations accordingly. Consent mode and server-side approaches can recover modelled data, but anyone promising complete measurement with a compliant banner is describing something that does not exist.

Reporting people will actually read

The default dashboards answer questions nobody asked. A monthly PDF of sessions and bounce rate gets filed unread, and rightly so.

Useful reporting starts from the decisions you have to make: which channels to fund next quarter, which pages to fix, whether last month's work paid for itself. Three or four numbers tied to those, with a sentence of interpretation, beats forty charts. We build to that, and we would rather send a short report that changes a decision than a long one that demonstrates effort.

Data you should keep hold of

Analytics platforms change, and they take your history with them. The GA4 migration destroyed years of comparable data for businesses that had not exported anything.

A monthly export of the numbers that matter — enquiries by channel, revenue, key page performance — into a spreadsheet you own costs almost nothing and protects you from the next platform change. It also means year-on-year comparisons survive whatever Google does next.

Attribution without pretending

A customer might find you through search, see you on LinkedIn, ask a colleague, and convert from a direct visit weeks later. Every attribution model assigns credit differently and none is objectively right.

We would rather give you a defensible view — which channels appear in converting journeys, and which appear in journeys that go nowhere — than a single number implying precision that does not exist. The businesses that make good decisions treat attribution as evidence, not as arithmetic.