How Do I Know If My Website Is Working? 

Somewhere in your inbox there’s a monthly website report. It has a number on it, and nothing next to the number to say whether that number is good.

If nobody at your business has “read the website report” in their job description, that’s a reasonable place to end up. The tools were built for the businesses where somebody does.

The useful version of this takes about ten minutes a month, and it ignores most of what those dashboards put in front of you.

Count the things that only happen when it’s working

A visit is an input. Your website has a short list of actual jobs: get somebody to call, get somebody to fill in the form, get somebody to drive to you, get somebody to book.

Most of those leave a record somewhere, and several are being counted for you already.

Traffic still matters, because it’s the raw material. If visits doubled and calls stayed flat, that’s worth chasing: either the path from visit to call has a fault in it, or the extra visits were never the kind that call. But with ten minutes, spend them on the output.

Google already counts most of this for free

Open your Google Business Profile and go to Performance. Google’s help page names what’s in there, and the definitions are plainer than you’d expect from an analytics tool.

Calls is “the number of times a customer clicked on the call button on your Business Profile,” and Google notes you have to add your phone number before it tracks anything. Directions is “how many people asked for directions to your business.” Website clicks is “the number of times people clicked on the website link on your Business Profile.” Messages counts the number of different conversations. Bookings counts the bookings people completed, with a condition worth knowing: Google says it only produces data if your bookings are managed through a booking provider. Google also says only the metrics that apply to your business appear at all, so a missing Bookings row isn’t a fault.

Then there’s Searches, which Google describes as the search terms people used to find your business. Google adds that these show up whenever your Business Profile appears for a certain search, so the list is wider than the people who actually reached you. It’s still their words rather than an estimate of them. Google updates the list at the start of each month and says it can take up to 5 days to show up. So for the first few days of a month there’s nothing new to read, and what you are reading is last month’s.

Two limits to keep straight. Google says performance data is only available on a verified Business Profile, so if the Performance tab looks empty, check your verification first. And these are taps on your Google listing. Somebody who hit Call from Maps got their answer without ever loading your site. That’s a result, and it’s also a result your website analytics will never see, so these two sets of numbers are never going to reconcile.

What Search Console adds

Search Console holds Google’s record of how your site did in search results, and it reports four things: clicks, which Google defines as the number of times a user clicked your site from Google Search results; impressions, how many times your site appeared in Search results; CTR, clicks divided by impressions; and average position, which Google defines as the average position of the topmost result from your site.

It opens on the last three months. You can go further back than that, because Google says Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months, and new data shows up about 48 hours after it’s collected.

Average position is the number to hold loosely, because an average of your best-placed result smooths away the detail you’d want from it. Google also points out that results are specific to the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching, so a query can sit in your list and still not show your site when you run the same search yourself. Clicks and impressions hold up better.

In Google Analytics, pick one number

Analytics is the tool that drowns people, because it has more numbers than a small business needs and ranks none of them. You need one thing out of it: did somebody do the thing?

Google has a name for that. A key event is “an event that measures an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business,” and Google says any event you collect can become one. For a local service business that usually means the contact form submission or the tap on the phone number.

Mark that one as a key event and your monthly question has a single answer: how many key events last month, against the month before. Everything else in there is context for explaining a bad month.

Your bounce rate probably isn’t saying what you think

Start with Google’s definition, which is narrower than the name suggests.

Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. An engaged session is one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, or has a key event, or has 2 or more page views.

Read that threshold again. Ten seconds.

Somebody who lands on your hours, reads them, and leaves at the fifteen-second mark counts as engaged. Somebody who got the same answer in eight seconds counts as a bounce. For a business whose site partly exists to answer quick questions, a slice of your bounce rate is satisfied customers leaving happy.

Where the number does earn attention: if a lot of sessions end inside ten seconds and your phone isn’t ringing either, then look at what the page actually does on a phone, starting with how fast it loads.

So what’s a good number?

We aren’t going to hand you an industry average, and you should be wary of the ones you find. Even a benchmark built for your industry is averaged across regions and business sizes. None of that averaging knows your trade or your town, which is why the figure can’t tell you whether your own number is good.

Your benchmark is your own history. Last 28 days against the previous 28, and this month against the same month last year. If your trade has a busy season, the year-over-year comparison is the one worth trusting, and the month-over-month one tells you whether something changed recently.

Two months of your own numbers tell you more about your business than any published average can.

One caveat on reading a decline. If the line slid gradually, you’re looking at a trend. If it fell off a cliff on one particular day, that’s a different question with a different answer.

One setting worth checking before you need the data

Google Analytics has a data retention setting, and it matters more than it sounds like it should.

On a standard property, event-level data can be kept for 2 months or 14 months. Google says data is deleted automatically on a monthly basis once it reaches the end of that period. The monthly numbers in this article survive either way. Google is specific that the setting doesn’t affect standard aggregated reports, even when you build comparisons inside them. What the short setting costs you is the layer underneath: explorations and funnel reports, which are exactly where you’d go to answer a question like “what did people look at before they called us.”

Go and check which of the two your property is on. On the 2-month setting, that deeper question only ever reaches back two months, and Google says raising the limit later applies only to data it hasn’t already deleted.

The ten-minute version

Once a month:

1. Google Business Profile, Performance. Calls, direction requests, website clicks, plus Messages or Bookings if those rows show up for you. Glance at the search terms while you’re in there.
2. Analytics, if your contact form is how work arrives. Key events this month against last month.
3. Search Console. Clicks, and whether impressions moved with them.

Write those numbers in the same place every month. A spreadsheet is fine. A notebook is fine.

By the third month you’ll have the one thing no benchmark can give you: a sense of what a normal month looks like for your business. After that the question gets much easier. Is this month ahead of the same month last year? You’ll have the numbers to answer that one.