Google Analytics

What Google Analytics is

Google Analytics is Google’s free web and app analytics platform, used to understand how people find a website, what they do on it and which actions they take. Its current version, GA4 (Google Analytics 4), replaced the older Universal Analytics in 2023 and works on an event-based model: instead of just counting pageviews, it records discrete actions, a form submission, a phone-number tap, a scroll, a button click, as events you can measure and act on.

That shift matters. For a local business, the question isn’t “how many pageviews did I get?” but “how many people enquired, and where did they come from?” GA4 is built to answer exactly that. It’s typically deployed alongside Google Tag Manager (GTM), a free tool that lets you add and change tracking tags without editing the website’s code each time.

How HDC uses Google Analytics

GA4 is our measurement layer, the thing we wire into a site so every other marketing decision rests on real data rather than guesswork. In practice:

• We install Google Tag Manager once, then manage GA4 and every tracking tag from inside it, keeping the site’s own code clean and fast.
• We track the events that matter to enquiries, quote-form submissions, click-to-call taps, key page visits, and mark the right ones as conversions.
• We link GA4 to Google Ads so those conversions feed straight back into bidding, telling the campaigns which clicks actually became booked work.
• We watch traffic sources and funnels to see where visitors come from and where they drop off, so we can fix the leak instead of buying more traffic.

Why we apply it

Two things waste a local business’s marketing budget: spending on channels that don’t convert, and losing visitors on pages nobody has measured. GA4 closes both gaps. When you can see that one town’s ad campaign produces enquiries and another only produces clicks, you can move the budget, and more of every pound reaches a job you can actually win.

It also keeps us honest. We don’t deal in vanity metrics; we report on enquiries, conversion rates and cost per lead. Measurement turns “the website feels busy” into “the website booked this much work,” which is the only number that pays the bills.

How Google Analytics fits our stack

GA4 sits at the centre of the marketing side of our stack. It’s installed through Google Tag Manager on sites we usually build with Astro and host on Cloudflare. Its conversion data feeds Google Ads so spend follows results, and the same forms it measures hand leads on to Zapier for routing and to Brevo for email follow-up. Together that means a visitor’s journey, from the ad they clicked to the enquiry they sent to the email they receive, is both measured and acted on, end to end.

When Google Analytics isn’t the right tool

GA4 measures behaviour; it doesn’t capture or store leads, and it isn’t a CRM. For the enquiry itself we rely on the form, Zapier and the client’s CRM, GA4 just tells us the enquiry happened and where it came from. For very privacy-sensitive projects, or clients who want simpler reporting without Google’s data model, a lightweight privacy-first analytics tool can be a better fit, and we’ll recommend that instead. And no analytics tool fixes a site with nothing worth measuring, the conversion-focused build comes first, the measurement second.