A strong online presence matters for the growth of your business. So how do you know your website is performing, and that your digital marketing is paying you back? It starts with web analytics.
In the video below, Spectruss CEO Sam Silvey covers why website analytics matter, the data worth focusing on, and how to use it to prove a return on investment. We recorded it in 2020. The tools have changed since then, and we have updated this post to match. The principles have not changed at all.
The Platforms to Use Today
Google Analytics is still the default measurement platform for most businesses, and it is still free. But it is not the same product we talked about in the video. Google retired Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data on July 1, 2023. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) replaced it with an event-based model that follows people across your website and app instead of counting page views and sessions.
If your site still has an old Universal Analytics tag and nothing else, you are not measuring anything. Pair GA4 with Google Search Console to see the searches that bring people in, and with your CRM (HubSpot or whatever you use) to see which of those visitors became leads and customers. Bringing that data together lets you report across the whole customer journey, not just the website.
Know the goal for your website
As Sam says in the video, the job of your website is to move traffic toward your call to action: filling out a form, buying a product, booking a call or tapping a phone number. Once that call to action is clear, you can work on getting more people to take it.
Next, decide what each of those actions is worth to your business. In GA4, the actions you care about are marked as key events (Google renamed GA4 “conversions” to “key events” in 2024), and you can assign each one a value. That number is what lets you make decisions on real ROI instead of gut feel.
Understand your website traffic
Watching how people arrive at and move through your website tells you who your visitors are and where your site is letting them down. GA4 shows you which channels send traffic, which pages hold attention and where people leave.
Look at purchases, abandoned carts, engagement rate, the pages people click through and how long they stay. Together they show where the drop-off happens, what content your potential customers are looking for, and where your ad budget will do the most good.
Collect data from mobile, tablet and desktop
Most browsing now happens on a phone: StatCounter puts mobile at about 59% of worldwide web traffic as of September 2026, with desktop near 39% and tablets under 2%. Compare key events by device. If mobile visitors arrive in large numbers but rarely convert, the problem is usually your mobile experience, not your traffic.
Manage advertising spend to identify what converts best
Once you are collecting and reading the data, you can advertise with confidence. Return on ad spend (ROAS) is still one of the most important numbers in digital advertising. It answers the basic marketing question: “If I put X dollars into this channel, what do I get back?” Connecting your ad accounts to GA4 and your CRM tells you whether your budget is producing customers or just clicks.
We have been setting up measurement for companies since 2012, and it is where we start with every client. If you want help proving what your marketing returns, see how we approach data and analytics, or book a 15-minute call.
