Reference
What is Analytics?
Analytics measures what visitors do on your site — where they came from, what they viewed, what they completed. Cookieless options exist that answer the questions a small business actually has without requiring a consent banner.
Also called: web analytics · GA4
The questions worth answering
- How many people arrived, and from where
- Which pages they landed on and which they left from
- How many completed the action that matters — enquiry, purchase, call
- How that splits by device, because mobile and desktop behave differently
The cookie trade-off
Analytics that sets cookies and identifies visitors requires consent under UK and EU rules, which means a banner, which reduces measurement and adds friction. Cookieless analytics counts visits without storing anything on the device, needs no banner, and answers all four questions above.
What most small businesses over-measure
Session duration, bounce rate and pageviews are the metrics people watch and the ones that change nothing. Enquiries by source is the number that decides where to spend next, and it is frequently not tracked at all.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding covers this properly — 6 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.