Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most widely used website analytics platform in the world, installed on over half of all websites globally. For small businesses, it's an essential (and free) tool for understanding who visits your website, where they come from, what they do on your site, and whether your marketing is actually working.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which replaced Universal Analytics in 2023, is built around an event-based data model. Instead of tracking page views in isolation, GA4 tracks every user interaction — button clicks, video plays, form submissions, scroll depth — as individual events. This gives you a much more complete picture of how users engage with your content than raw page view counts.

The acquisition reports are where most small businesses start. They show exactly which channels bring traffic: organic search, paid ads, social media, email, direct. With Google Search Console linked, you can see which search queries bring visitors and which pages rank highest. For e-commerce businesses, the e-commerce reports track revenue, conversion rate, and product performance by channel.

Conversion tracking is the engine of every marketing measurement strategy. You define what "conversion" means for your business — form submission, purchase, phone call, video view — and Google Analytics tracks how many users from each channel complete that action. This lets you calculate your actual cost per lead by channel, not just your cost per click.

The Explore reports in GA4 (funnel exploration, path analysis, segment overlap) are genuinely powerful for identifying where users drop off before converting. These tools were previously only available in premium analytics tools.

GA4 is free for most businesses. GA4 360, the enterprise version, adds higher data collection limits, unsampled reporting, and SLA guarantees for businesses processing hundreds of millions of events monthly.