Is your website making you money? A simple Google Analytics setup

Quick question. Last month, how many people filled out the form on your website? And where did they come from?

If you just shrugged, you are in very good company. Most owners I talk to have Google Analytics installed. Very few can answer that question. The tool is collecting data the whole time, but nobody told it what actually matters to the business.

Let me fix that. No dashboards with 40 charts. Just the setup that tells you whether your marketing is paying for itself.

First, make sure you are on GA4

GA4 (the current version of Google Analytics) is the only version still running.

How to check in 60 seconds: log in to Google Analytics and look at your property. If it says GA4, or the left menu shows Reports, Explore and Advertising, you are good. If you cannot log in at all, find out who owns the account today. You want your own business email as an administrator, not a past freelancer's.

Tell Analytics what a win looks like

Out of the box, GA4 counts visits, scrolls and clicks. Nice. But it does not know that a form submission is worth more to you than a page view.

That is what key events are for. A key event is just an action you mark as important. Google's help page on marking key events (opens in a new tab) walks through the clicks. For most service businesses, these are the ones that count:

1. 01
   Form submitted: someone filled out your contact or quote form.
2. 02
   Phone click: someone tapped your number on their phone.
3. 03
   Booking made: someone scheduled through your online booking.
4. 04
   Email click: someone tapped your email address.
5. 05
   Purchase: if you sell online, this is the big one.

Mark those as key events and suddenly every report can show you which pages, channels and campaigns actually produce customers.

Stretch your data retention to 14 months

This one is buried in the settings, and it bites people later.

Translation: if yours is on 2 months, you cannot dig into what happened last spring when you want to compare it to this spring. Go to Admin, then Data collection and modification, then Data retention, and pick 14 months. It takes 20 seconds and you will thank yourself next year.

Tag your links so you know where people came from

GA4 is pretty good at knowing who came from Google search. It is not great at knowing who came from your email newsletter, a QR code on your truck, or the link in your Instagram bio. Unless you tell it.

That is what UTM parameters do. They are little labels you add to the end of a link. Google's URL builder guide (opens in a new tab) says to always include these three:

• utm_source: where it came from, like instagram or newsletter.
• utm_medium: what kind of channel, like social or email.
• utm_campaign: what the push was, like spring-special.

So your Instagram bio link becomes something like yoursite.com/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=bio. Now every visit and every form from that link gets credited to Instagram. Magic. Well, not magic. Labels.

Five quick setup wins

1. 01
   Connect Search Console so you can see the actual Google searches that bring people to your site.
2. 02
   Link Google Ads if you run ads, so your ad account can see which clicks became leads.
3. 03
   Filter out your own visits. You and your staff checking the site every day is not "traffic."
4. 04
   Use one account, owned by the business. Not your nephew's. Not the agency's. Yours, with people added as users.
5. 05
   Write down what you changed and when. New website, new ad campaign, price change. When a number jumps, you will know why.

The four numbers I actually watch

Forget the 40 chart dashboard. Once a month, look at these four:

1. 01
   Key events by channel. Which sources (Google search, ads, social, email) produced forms, calls and bookings.
2. 02
   Key event rate. Out of all visitors, what share did something valuable. If it drops, something on the site broke or the traffic got worse.
3. 03
   Top landing pages by key events. The pages that turn visitors into customers. Protect them. Copy what makes them work.
4. 04
   Month over month and year over year. Seasons are real. Compare October to last October, not just to September.

That is it. Ten minutes a month. If you are spending money on marketing, these four numbers tell you whether it is working.

Common traps

• Counting the thank you page twice because someone refreshed it. Use a real form submit event when you can.
• Celebrating traffic that never converts. A blog post with 10,000 visits and zero leads is a hobby.
• Trusting a number nobody tested. If you never submitted your own form to check, you do not know that it counts.
• Panicking over one week. Small sites have small numbers. Look at months, not days.

Where to go from here

Log in today and check three things: that you are on GA4, that you have key events for forms and calls, and that retention is set to 14 months. That alone puts you ahead of most businesses I audit. And if you would rather have it set up and tested properly, the free audit includes a full tracking review: what is firing, what is missing, and what is double counting.