You have a traffic number, and somebody has sent you a rankings report. Both went up this month, which sounds like good news.

Neither of them answers the question you actually have, which is whether the website is doing the job you paid it to do.

Start with the one thing the website is for

Before any number means anything, name the thing a visitor does that is worth money to you. That might be a form filled in, a phone call placed from the website, a booking taken, an order placed, or a tap on the address that opens directions.

That action is the job. Traffic is people arriving, and arriving is not the job. A quiet month where four of the right people got in touch is a better month than a busy one where nobody did, and no report will tell you that unless you have decided in advance which of the two you were counting.

Most businesses have one action that matters and one or two smaller ones behind it. Write yours down before you look at anything else, because everything below is a question about that action rather than about the website in general.

Find out whether that action is being recorded at all

Analytics software does not know what matters to your business. Every time somebody views a page, watches a video or presses a button, that is logged as an event, and the software will go on logging events for years without ever singling out the one you care about, because nobody told it which one that is.

The ones that count have a name. Google Analytics calls them key events, and its definition is exactly what you would want it to be: “A key event is an event that measures an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business.” How one comes to exist is the part worth reading twice. “To measure a key event, create or identify an event that measures the action and then mark the event as a key event.”

There is one exception worth knowing about. Google Analytics marks a short list of events as key events by default, and on a website that list includes a purchase. Marking is not the same as recording, though. The website still has to send a record of each order to Analytics before there is anything to mark, which is why an online shop should confirm that its orders are showing up rather than assume the default has taken care of it. Everything else, a form, a call, a booking request, has to be identified and marked by somebody.

Until that happens, the action you care about is either sitting in the reports as one more event among many, or it is not being recorded at all.

Ask whoever looks after your website which actions are recorded as key events, and ask them to show you where those appear in the reports. If the answer is that none are, ask what it would take to change that. Marking an event already being collected is a different piece of work from setting up the recording in the first place, and their answer tells you which one you are facing.

Numbers can be missing without being wrong

If a report looks emptier than you expected, the figures may have been withheld rather than never earned. Google Analytics holds some data back to protect the privacy of individual users, and its guidance on the symptom is plain: “If you have limited access to data in a report or exploration, it may be because a data threshold has been applied.”

An empty row can therefore mean that nothing happened, or that Analytics declined to show you what did. Those are worth telling apart before you act on either one, and whoever set up your reporting can usually say which you are looking at.

A recorded action is not the same as a received one

A form can submit successfully, record beautifully, and still deliver nothing to your inbox. Several things have to happen after the visitor presses the button, and the one you care about, the message reaching you, is the last of them.

Send a test through your own form and confirm it arrives where a real one should. That test proves the route worked at that moment, from your device and network, to the address it currently uses. It does not prove the same message would reach a different address, survive a change to your e-mail setup, or clear a spam filter belonging to somebody else. Treat it as a spot check worth repeating rather than a thing you settle once.

The same goes for a phone number and an address. Call the number on the website from a phone that is not yours, and check that the address opens the right map.

What rankings and traffic actually tell you

Google Search Console is Google’s own free report on how your website appears in search results, and it is worth knowing what each of its numbers counts. Another tool may use the same words to mean something else, so check which report you have been sent before reading anything into it.

An impression is a sighting. Google’s definition is that “An impression means that a user has seen (or potentially seen) a link to your site in Search, Discover, or News.” A click is what it sounds like: “any click that sends the user to a page outside of Google Search, Discover, or News is counted as a click.”

Position is the number that gets misread. It is an average, and Google says so plainly: “Position value is the average position for all searches. For your specific search your position might be different than the average because of many variables, such as your search history, location, and so on.”

A position of 4.2 is therefore not where you sit. It is the middle of a range of places you appeared, to different people, in different towns, on different days. Watching it move by a decimal point tells you very little.

Those numbers describe how visible you were in search and how many clicks came from it, which is not quite the same as how many people, since one person can click more than once. All of it is worth watching. None of it reaches as far as the action you named at the beginning, and that answer sits in the recording you have just checked.

Give the number enough room to mean something

A local business often gets a handful of the actions that matter in a month. Handfuls move around on their own. Two calls one month and five the next looks like a jump, and at those sizes it can just as easily be an ordinary month sitting next to another ordinary month.

Look at a longer stretch, and compare it with the same stretch a year earlier rather than with the month before, so that a seasonal business is not measured against its own quiet season. What you are looking for is a direction that holds across several periods, not a single reading that looks encouraging.

What working looks like

A website that is working shows you the action you named happening, often enough and steadily enough that you are no longer guessing about it. Whether that volume is worth what the website costs you is a judgment only you can make, and it is one you cannot make at all while the action is going uncounted. If you have never added those costs up, what it costs to keep a website running lists what is usually in them.

Some of that may take work on the website itself, and some of it is only a matter of switching the counting on. Once the right action is recorded, checked end to end, and given enough time to add up, the reports stop being decorative and start answering the question you had at the beginning. Giving it that time is its own discipline, and when your website should be left alone covers it.

If you would like us to look at what your website is currently recording and tell you what it can and cannot show you, e-mail sales@allydrez.com.