Data Analytics
Most analytics dashboards show you 40 metrics. Maybe five of them matter for a small business making operational decisions. The rest are interesting at scale. This guide names the five that most reliably signal whether something is working or broken.
Pages per session (or equivalent engagement signal)
Not time-on-site — that number includes tabs left open. Pages per session tells you whether visitors are finding what they came for and exploring further, or landing and leaving. A page per session close to 1.0 across all traffic means your content or navigation is not matching visitor intent. Dig into which entry pages have the highest single-page exit rates first.
Top entry pages vs. intended entry pages
Where visitors actually enter your site versus where you want them to enter. If your pricing page is your second-highest entry point, you have visitors arriving with high commercial intent and no context. That is either a problem (they bounce because they have no idea what you do) or an opportunity (they are ready to buy and you need to make it easy). You cannot know which without looking.
Referrer distribution
Where your traffic comes from. Not to obsess over channels, but to understand dependency. If 80% of your visitors come from one source, you have a single point of failure in your acquisition. This metric tells you that before the source disappears.
Mobile vs. desktop split
Not for vanity — to make sure you are testing your most important pages on the device most of your visitors use. A site that looks perfect on a 27-inch monitor can be completely broken on the device that 60% of your visitors are using.
Conversion path drop-off
For whatever your primary conversion is — contact form, sign-up, purchase — map the path and find where visitors leave. The drop-off point is almost always fixable and almost always more impactful than adding new traffic.
See all five of these metrics for your own site — without cookies, without consent banners.