Google Analytics
The visit counter for the website. Useful in moderation, and easy to misread.
What does Google Analytics mean?
A free Google tool that counts visits to your website, which pages they opened, and roughly where the visits came from. It is not the same as your Google Business Profile.
Also called: GA4, analytics
What the numbers are
Analytics records that a browser opened a page. It can group those opens by page, by day, and by a rough source such as search or a link you tagged. It does not know the visitor's name. It does not know that a phone call came from the person who just read the furnace page, unless you have a separate setup to connect those events.
The product now in use is GA4. Older articles still say Universal Analytics, which Google retired. If a tutorial's screenshots do not match your account, it is probably the old product.
What owners should ignore at first
Real-time fidgeting, vanity totals, and any report you cannot act on. A small local site may have a quiet week and a loud week because of weather or a neighborhood Facebook post. Read the trend of which service pages get opened, and whether the contact page is among them.
Analytics is not Search Console. Console talks about queries and indexing. Analytics talks about visits that already happened. Neither one is the map listing. The Google Business Profile has its own stats inside Google's business tools.
Access and privacy
Create the account on a Google login the business owns. Give a designer access without making them the only admin. If you part ways, you should not lose the history.
Tell people the site uses analytics if you use it, inside the privacy policy. Do not paste a tracking snippet you do not recognize into the header because a forum said it helps SEO. We can add a tag you already own. Inventing a measurement plan is not part of pretending a number went up.
An example
An accountant checked Analytics daily and worried the site had failed because Tuesday was quiet. The useful view was monthly: the bookkeeping page was the one people opened, and the tax-tips draft almost nobody reached. They put effort into the page that matched the visits, and stopped treating a single afternoon as a verdict.
Questions we get asked
Does Artol include Analytics setup?
The website does not depend on it. If you want the tag installed, bring the measurement id from an account you control and we will add it as part of launch or as a small update. We will not invent traffic figures in a report.
Can Analytics see my form submissions?
Not the contents, and not automatically as a count, unless someone configured an event. Check the inbox for the real messages. Use Analytics for which pages are opened, not as the system of record for leads.
