“I have a website but I have no idea what it’s doing for me.”
This is the most common feeling I run into, by a mile. The site is up. It looks fine. People occasionally mention it on the phone. But you’ve never seen a number. You don’t know how many people visit a week. You don’t know what page they land on, whether they read your services page or bounce in three seconds, or whether your Facebook page is doing more of the heavy lifting than the site itself.
Most of the time, it’s not that the data doesn’t exist. It’s that:
- The web company who built the site never installed analytics, or
- They did, and you’ve never been shown the report, or
- You log in once a quarter, see “pageviews: 47” and a chart that means nothing, and close the tab.
A free, plain-English walk-through of those numbers fixes that in 30 minutes.
“Phone calls — and no idea where they came from.”
Here’s the second-most-common version of the same pain. A customer calls. You ask “how’d you hear about us?” and they say:
“Google.”
Which doesn’t tell you Google search, Google Maps, your Google Business Profile, or someone who just saw a review you got.
“Facebook.”
Which could mean a post, a group, your business page, an ad, or a friend who shared a photo of your work.
“A friend.”
Could be a real referral. Could be a friend who saw your site three weeks ago and didn’t think to mention it.
That’s not your customers being unhelpful. It’s normal. They don’t remember because they’re busy living their life. The job of attribution is for the website and the analytics to remember for them.
When that’s set up right, every visit, every form submission, every map click on your Google Business Profile is tagged at the source. You stop guessing about which posts, ads, and listings are pulling their weight, and you start seeing.
What 30 minutes of looking at your numbers actually shows you
This is what I do on the review call. We sit down with screen-share, open up your analytics, and look at four things together — in English, not jargon.
- Where your visitors actually come from. Google search, Google Maps, Facebook, LinkedIn, a QR code from a business card, direct typed-in URL, your email signature — every visit gets a source.
- What pages people read. Which ones are pulling time on site (those are the ones earning their place) and which ones get a 5-second bounce.
- Where they drop off. Visitors who hit your contact page and leave instantly are the loudest signal something’s broken — a slow load, a form that doesn’t work on mobile, a missing phone number, an address that doesn’t match Google.
- Whether your ads are even being tracked. I see this constantly: a business spending $200/month on Google Ads with their tracking misconfigured, so the ads show “0 seconds on page” and the spend is invisible. Fixing that alone usually pays for the year.
What you walk away with
After the call, you get a short write-up — 3 to 5 specific things to change on your site, your ads, or your local listings to turn more visits into calls. Pages to add. Sources to double down on. Leaks to plug. Yours to keep, no matter what you do with it.
If you don’t have Google Analytics installed yet, I’ll set that up too as part of the review. The whole thing is free, no pitch attached.
Why I’m doing this
I’m a Davisburg, Michigan-based product consultant. I help local businesses across Oakland and Genesee County — Clarkston, Waterford, Flint, Pontiac, Rochester Hills, all of it — build websites they actually own. I’d rather show three of you what a real analytics review looks like than argue about it on the internet. Three local businesses get picked at random on August 1.
If you’ve got a website and you don’t know what it’s doing for you — or if you’re getting calls and have no clue where they’re coming from — enter the July giveaway. Three free reviews, drawn August 1. And if you refer someone who gets picked, you get picked too.