Web analytics

Web analytics is the practice of collecting and interpreting data about how people use your website. At its simplest, it tells you how many people visited, where they came from, and what they did. At its most advanced, it connects every touchpoint in a customer journey to revenue outcomes and predicts future behavior. The tooling has evolved dramatically — from server log analysis to JavaScript tags to server-side event collection — but the fundamental question remains: is your website doing its job?

The gap between having analytics and using analytics is where most organizations fail. I have seen companies with enterprise-grade implementations that nobody looks at, and scrappy startups with basic setups that check their data daily and iterate constantly. The tool matters far less than the habit. What you need is a clear measurement plan that maps business questions to specific metrics, a regular cadence of analysis, and someone who can translate data into action items that non-analysts understand.

For growth work, web analytics is your feedback mechanism for everything else you do. Launched a campaign? Analytics tells you if it worked. Redesigned a page? Analytics shows the impact. Changed your pricing? Analytics reveals the behavioral shift. Without it, you are flying blind. The transition from Universal Analytics to GA4 scrambled a lot of institutional knowledge, but the discipline itself is more important than ever as privacy regulations reshape what and how we can measure.