Google Analytics (GA4)
- What people do on your site
- Which pages get read, and for how long
- Whether visitors reached your contact form
- Where the traffic came from, by channel
- Requires a tag on your pages to see anything
Google Analytics setup
Analytics that answer real questions
Most analytics setups produce a dashboard nobody opens. A useful one answers a specific question: are the pages you paid for bringing you enquiries, and where do people give up?
Google Analytics setup is the work of making a site report what actually happens on it: which pages get read, where visitors come from, and whether they reach the action you care about. The current version is GA4, and it is event-based: nothing meaningful is tracked unless someone decides what counts as meaningful and configures it.
That last part is where most setups fail. The tag gets pasted in, page views start counting, and the question the owner actually had, whether the site is bringing in work, never gets answered because nobody ever told the tool what a lead looks like.
What a proper analytics setup involves
Installing the tag is the smallest part of the job. Here is what the rest of it is.
Deciding what you are measuring first
Before any code goes near the site: what decision will this data inform? For most small businesses the answer is short. Did the enquiry come in, and what did the person read before it did. Everything else is interesting, not useful. A setup built around a real question stays small and gets used.
The property and the tag
A GA4 property, configured with the right data retention and settings, and the tag loaded so it never blocks the page from rendering. Analytics that slow your site down are costing you more than they tell you. If the site is already sluggish, that is a speed problem to fix rather than to measure around.
Events that mean something
GA4 counts events. Out of the box it counts generic ones like page views and scrolls. The valuable ones are yours: a contact form submitted, a phone number tapped on a mobile, a quote request started but abandoned. These have to be configured deliberately, and they are the difference between a dashboard and an answer.
Connecting it to Search Console
Analytics knows what happened on the site. It does not know what happened in the search results that sent people there. Linking a Search Console property fills in that half. Kept apart, you are reading two halves of a sentence.
The part most setups get wrong: personal data
This is worth reading properly, because it is both a legal condition and a design decision, and it is routinely ignored.
The Google Analytics Terms of Service forbid sending personally identifiable information to Google. Not discourage: forbid. No names, no email addresses, no phone numbers, no message contents, and no putting any of that in a page URL that analytics then records. The penalty is your data being deleted or your account being terminated, and the obligation sits with you, not with whoever installed the tag.
It gets broken constantly, and usually by accident. A contact form that redirects to a thank-you page carrying the visitor's email in the URL has just sent that email to Google. Nobody intended it. It still happened.
How our own site handles it
We will describe our own setup rather than speak in the abstract, because we had to make this decision too. Our site records that a lead action happened. It does not record who did it. No name, no email address, no phone number, no message text ever enters analytics. We know a quote request was submitted and which page the person was on when they did it, which is exactly what we need to know, and nothing more.
You lose nothing useful by working this way. "Someone submitted the form from the local SEO page" is the fact that changes what you do next. Their name is in your inbox already, where it belongs.
The privacy notice is not optional
Google's terms require you to publish a privacy notice disclosing your use of cookies and analytics. If you are running analytics without one, you are out of compliance with the product you are using. It is a page of honest text, not a legal ordeal. Ours is at our privacy notice.
Analytics and Search Console are constantly confused
They are both free Google tools with graphs in them, which is where the similarity ends. Knowing which one answers your question saves a lot of wasted staring.
Google Search Console
- How Google crawls and indexes your site
- Which searches you appeared in, and your clicks
- Whether a page is indexed, and why not if it is not
- Technical faults Google hit on your site
- Requires verifying you own the domain
How we approach it
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Ask what you actually want to know
Usually it is one or two questions, not twenty. The setup gets built around those, which is why it ends up small enough to be maintained and read.
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Check what is already there
Old tags, duplicate tags, a property nobody can log into any more, or a setup quietly sending data it should not. This turns up more often than you would think, and it has to be cleaned up before anything new is trusted.
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Configure the property and the tag
A GA4 property with sensible settings, and the tag loaded so it does not delay your page rendering.
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Track the actions that matter
Form submissions, phone taps, and whatever counts as a lead in your business. Configured to report the action, never the person.
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Link Search Console and verify it
Connect the two so search data and site behaviour sit together, then test the whole path end to end. An event nobody tested is a guess with a graph on it.
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Make sure the privacy notice matches reality
The page has to describe what the site genuinely does. A copied privacy policy that describes someone else's setup is worse than useless.
What analytics will not do for you
Said plainly, because expectations here are frequently oversold.
- It will not tell you who visited. That is forbidden by Google's own terms, not a feature gap. Tools promising otherwise deserve hard questions about their data source.
- It will not be perfectly accurate. Ad blockers, privacy settings and instant bounces all remove data. Analytics is a reliable measure of change and direction, not a headcount.
- It will not bring you traffic. Measuring a thing does not improve it. Analytics tells you where to spend your effort; the effort still has to happen, usually as local SEO or better pages.
- It will not fix a site nobody can find. If the problem is that you are not in the index at all, analytics will faithfully report almost nothing. That is a Search Console question.
- It will not read itself. A dashboard with no owner is a cost, not an asset. Fewer numbers, checked occasionally, beat a wall of charts checked never.
Who this is for
- Businesses spending money or effort on their site who cannot tell what it is returning
- Anyone whose analytics were installed once and never configured to track an enquiry
- Owners who suspect their numbers are wrong, or who have two tools that disagree
- Sites where a form was changed and nobody knows if tracking survived it
- Anyone who inherited a site with tags they cannot identify or log into
When this is not the right fit
- Businesses that want to identify individual visitors by name. That is not something we will set up: it breaches the terms of the product.
- A brand new site with no visitors yet. Get it built and found first; measurement of nothing is still nothing.
- Anyone who will not read the data or act on it. If nobody will look, honestly, the money is better spent on the site itself.
- Businesses wanting analytics instead of a privacy notice. The notice is a condition of using the tool, so it comes with the job.
What SolvenceHQ can help with
We set up analytics the way we run our own: built around a real question, tracking the action rather than the person, and tested end to end so the numbers can be trusted.
- GA4 property and tag setup, loaded so it does not slow the site
- Event tracking for form submissions, phone taps and real lead actions
- Audit and cleanup of old, duplicate or orphaned tags
- A privacy-safe configuration that sends no personal data to Google
- Search Console linked, so search data and site behaviour sit together
- A privacy notice that accurately describes what your site actually does
- Plain-English explanation of what the numbers mean, and what they do not
- Ongoing checks as part of website maintenance, so tracking does not silently break
Common questions
What is the difference between Google Analytics and Search Console?
Analytics measures what people do on your site once they arrive: which pages they read, where they came from, and whether they reached the contact form. Search Console shows how Google sees your site before anyone arrives: what it crawled, what it indexed, and which searches you appeared in.
They answer different questions and neither replaces the other. Most businesses want both, connected to each other, so you can follow a search through to what the visitor actually did.
Can Google Analytics tell me who visited my website?
No, and it must not. The Google Analytics Terms of Service forbid sending personally identifiable information into the product: no names, email addresses, phone numbers, or the contents of a form message. Accounts have been terminated over it.
Some tools advertise visitor identification. Read carefully what they are actually doing and where the data comes from before you connect anything like that to your site.
Do I need a privacy policy to use Google Analytics?
Yes. Google's terms require you to publish a privacy notice that discloses your use of cookies and analytics, and to have the rights you need to collect the data. This is not optional fine print, it is a condition of using the product. Ours is at our privacy notice.
Why do my analytics numbers not match my ad platform or Search Console?
Because they are counting different things. Search Console counts what happened in Google search results. Analytics counts what happened in a browser on your site, and only when its tag actually loads: ad blockers, privacy browsers and people who leave instantly all shave off data.
Treat analytics as a reliable measure of direction and change, not as a perfect census. If two tools disagree by a little, that is normal. If they disagree wildly, that is usually a tagging fault worth finding.
Is analytics worth it for a small site with few visitors?
Often yes, but for a narrower reason than people expect. On a low-traffic site the visitor counts are too small to read as trends. What is still worth having is proof that your enquiry path works: that the form submits, and that the pages you invested in are the ones being read. That is a small, specific setup rather than a dashboard nobody opens.
Related services and guides
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Technical SEO
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Local SEO
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Google Search Console errors
What the common reports mean, and which ones are not problems.
Website maintenance
Edits, updates, backups and monitoring so the site keeps working.
Small business IT consulting
Straight advice on the systems your business runs on.
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