Auditing a website's analytics and tracking setup

Ask a local business owner how many enquiries their website brought in last month and you will often get a shrug. Not because the answer is bad, but because nobody is counting. Auditing a website's analytics and tracking setup is one of the quickest ways to find that out, and it needs no login to the client's accounts for a first look. This post covers what to check from the outside, what the findings usually mean, and how to raise them without overreaching.

Why tracking is worth checking at all

A website with no measurement is a website nobody can improve with confidence. If a roofer in Lincoln pays for a redesign and the phone rings more, great. If it rings less, there is nothing to compare against. The owner cannot tell whether the new site helped, hurt or made no difference, and that makes it hard to justify any further spend, including your retainer.

There is also a practical point for you. A prospect who is not tracking anything has no baseline, so you cannot honestly promise an improvement. Setting up basic measurement is a small, concrete first job that makes every later piece of work easier to prove.

What you can check without a login

Everything below can be done from a normal browser. You are looking for evidence of what the site loads, not reading anyone's data.

1. View the page source. Right-click, choose to view source, and search for terms such as gtag, googletagmanager, analytics or fbq. A hit means a tracking script is present. No hit on any page you try is a strong sign nothing is installed, though a plugin that loads scripts only after consent can hide them until you accept.
2. Watch the network tab. Open the browser developer tools, load the page, and filter requests for the same terms. This shows what actually fires, rather than what the source suggests.
3. Use a tag checker. Free browser extensions from the analytics vendors list the tags a page loads and whether they fire correctly. They are quicker than reading source by eye.
4. Test the key actions. Submit the enquiry form, click the phone number, follow the booking link. Then see whether any request leaves the page that looks like an event. Often the pageviews are tracked and the things that matter are not.

The usual problems

After a few of these checks, patterns appear. The same handful of faults turn up again and again on small business sites.

• Nothing installed. Common on sites built once and left alone, or where the agency that built it never set up an account in the owner's name.
• An old property. A script left over from the older Universal Analytics, which Google stopped collecting data for in 2023. The tag may still be on the page, quietly doing nothing useful.
• Pageviews but no conversions. The site counts visitors, but form submissions, calls and bookings are not recorded, so the owner cannot link traffic to enquiries.
• Tracking on the wrong account. The previous designer set it up under their own login. The owner has never seen a report and may not know it exists.
• Tags firing before consent. This is a privacy issue as much as a measurement one. We cover it in website cookie consent and privacy basics.
• Duplicate tags. Two installs of the same tool, usually after a plugin and a manual snippet were both added. Numbers get inflated and nobody notices.

What you cannot tell from outside

Be honest about the limits. From the outside you can see that a tag is present and fires. You cannot see whether the data is accurate, who has access, or whether goals are configured correctly inside the account. Describe findings accordingly. “I could not find any tracking code on the homepage or contact page” is a statement you can stand behind. “Your analytics is broken” is a guess.

Raising it with the business owner

Frame it as a question the owner can answer, not a failing. Something like: “When I looked at the site, I could not see anything that measures the enquiry form. Do you know how many enquiries come through it each month?” If they do not, you have a natural opening and they have said so themselves.

Keep the offer small. Installing tracking, setting up a handful of events for the form, calls and bookings, and giving the owner their own login is a modest piece of work with a clear outcome. It can stand alone or sit alongside a bigger fix. If the site also has a dead booking link or a weak contact form, the tracking gap makes those problems visible, which we describe in dead booking links and broken forms.

Where Patchscout fits

When Patchscout audits a prospect's website, it checks speed, SEO, mobile behaviour, SSL and the site builder, and our system uses those findings to draft an outreach email in your own voice. Analytics and tracking are not part of that audit, so this is a check you add by hand once a prospect looks promising. It is ten minutes with a browser and it often gives you a specific, honest line for the email.

However you find the business, the principle is the same. Look at the actual site, note what you can verify, and write only that.