87 percent of companies collect behavioural data. Only 25 percent actually use it. For most small businesses, Google Analytics is not a tool. It is a habit.
Everyone has it. Nobody asked why.
Google Analytics is installed on 43 percent of all websites. Nearly half the internet. It is the most widely used analytics tool ever made, and for most small businesses, the story of how it got there is the same.
Your developer set it up when they built the site. Or you followed a tutorial. Or your hosting provider offered it as a one-click install. Nobody sat down and asked what questions the business needed answered. Nobody asked what you would do with the data once you had it. It was just... included. Like a terms and conditions page. Something a website is supposed to have.
And now it sits there. Collecting data. Sending it to Google. Running its scripts on every page, on every visit, for every customer who lands on your site. You might check it once a month. You might not check it at all.
What do you actually do with the data?
This is the question that matters, and it is the one nobody asks.
You open Google Analytics. You see that 347 people visited your website last month. You feel good about that, or bad about it, depending on whether the number went up or down. Then you close the tab.
What did you change? What decision did you make? What did you do differently because of that number?
If the answer is nothing, then you do not have an analytics tool. You have a scoreboard. And you are checking it the same way you check likes on an Instagram post. A quick glance, a small emotional reaction, and then back to whatever you were doing before.
87 percent of companies collect behavioural data. Only 25 percent actually use it. 62 percent of businesses have no data analytics strategy at all. They have the tools. They have the data. They have no plan for what to do with either.
Pageviews are the vanity metric
Pageviews go up over time. They almost always do. Total counts can only increase, which makes them feel like progress even when nothing has changed. A confused visitor who clicks through eight pages looking for your phone number counts as more engagement than a satisfied customer who finds what they need immediately.
Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup, called these vanity metrics. Numbers that make you feel good but do not help you make a decision. Pageviews, sessions, bounce rate. They tell you something happened. They do not tell you what to do about it.
A local plumber does not need to know that 412 people visited the site and the average session duration was 1 minute 43 seconds. A local plumber needs to know whether the phone is ringing. If it is, the website is working. If it is not, the answer is almost never hidden inside Google Analytics.
A tank to swat a fly
Google Analytics 4 was built for enterprise companies with dedicated marketing teams, data analysts, and advertising budgets large enough to justify the complexity. It tracks up to 25 event parameters per interaction, supports 50 custom dimensions and 50 custom metrics per property, and with Google Signals enabled, it estimates age range, gender, and interests.
A five-page website for a local business needs to know four things. How many people visited. Where they came from. Which pages they looked at. Whether they filled in the contact form. That is it. Four data points.
GA4 gives you hundreds of data points, most of which you will never look at. Gartner found that marketers use only 33 percent of their marketing technology stack capabilities. The rest sits there, unused, collecting dust and collecting your visitors' data.
It is like using a tank to swat a fly.
What it costs your website
Google Analytics is not free. You pay with your website's performance.
A controlled benchmark study measured the real cost of analytics scripts. GA4 downloads 154.9 kilobytes of compressed JavaScript, making it one of the heaviest third-party scripts on most small business websites. Once decompressed in the browser, that becomes 454 kilobytes of code that needs to be parsed and executed. It allocates 2.6 megabytes of memory. If you add Google Tag Manager on top, the total rises to 756 kilobytes of JavaScript and 4.3 megabytes of memory. Our blog Death by a Thousand Plugins covers the full cost of third-party scripts on small business websites.
For comparison, privacy-focused alternatives like Plausible weigh 1.9 kilobytes compressed and 2.9 kilobytes decompressed. That makes GA4 156 times heavier than Plausible. The analytics tool you installed because your developer said you should is loading more code than most of the actual features on your website.
Swapping GA4 for a lightweight alternative can recover 10 to 15 PageSpeed points and reduce Total Blocking Time by 100 to 200 milliseconds on mobile. That is the difference between a website that feels instant and one that feels sluggish.
It is the reason you need a cookie banner
Google Analytics sets cookies. Under UK PECR, any technology that stores information on a user's device requires informed, specific consent before it fires. That means a cookie consent banner. That annoying pop-up that every website seems to have.
The cookie banner is not just annoying. It is another third-party script. Another 35 to 121 kilobytes of JavaScript loaded on every page. Another external server your visitor's browser has to contact. You installed a script that required a banner, then installed another script to show the banner. Your analytics tool now has a dependency. Our blog Is your website GDPR compliant? explains the full picture of what the law requires.
And here is the part that should concern you. When a proper reject button is offered with equal prominence to accept, 50 to 60 percent of visitors reject analytics cookies. In some European markets, fewer than 25 percent accept. Half your visitors are telling GA4 not to track them. Your data is incomplete before it even starts.
Remove the tracking cookies and you remove the need for the banner. Simpler compliance. Cleaner experience. Fewer scripts.
A quarter of your visitors are invisible anyway
36 percent of UK adults use ad-blocking software. Google Analytics is one of the first things ad blockers filter out. Those visitors land on your site, browse your pages, and leave. GA4 never knows they existed.
Combine that with the 50 to 60 percent who reject cookies when asked, and a UK small business could easily be missing data on more than half its actual visitors. You are making decisions based on a sample that is not just incomplete but systematically biased. The visitors you cannot see tend to be younger, higher income, and more technically sophisticated. Arguably the most valuable potential customers.
You are not looking at your audience. You are looking at the portion of your audience that does not block trackers and does not click reject. That is not insight. That is guesswork with a dashboard.
What we use instead
This website does not run Google Analytics. It never has.
We use Vercel Analytics, which is cookieless, collects no personal data, and adds less than 1.6 kilobytes to the page. It tells us which pages people visit and where they came from. It does not need a cookie banner because it does not set cookies. It is not blocked by ad blockers because it does not track individuals.
We know how many people visit. We know which pages they look at. We know whether they came from Google, from social media, or from a direct link. When someone fills in our contact form, we know about it because we receive the enquiry. We do not need Google to tell us our phone rang.
That is not a limitation. It is a choice. We looked at what we actually needed, found a tool that does exactly that, and left everything else out. The result is a faster website, no cookie banner, no privacy concerns, and no dashboard full of data we would never act on.
The bottom line
Google Analytics is a powerful tool. It is genuinely useful for businesses that run paid advertising campaigns, employ marketing teams, and have the resources to analyse data and act on it. If you are running thousands of pounds in Google Ads and need to track conversion paths across multiple touchpoints, GA4 is built for exactly that.
But most small businesses are not doing that. Most small businesses installed Google Analytics because someone told them to. They check the numbers occasionally. They do not change anything because of them. And meanwhile, the script is slowing their site down, triggering a cookie banner, and sending their visitors' data to Google.
If you are going to use it, use it properly. Set up goals. Review the data regularly. Make decisions based on what it tells you. But if you are honest with yourself and the answer is that you just glance at the visitor count every few weeks, then you do not need it. Remove it. Your website will be faster, your visitors will not be nagged by a cookie banner, and you will not miss it.
How we can help
Every website we build at BIG MOUTH is designed to give you the information you need without the overhead you do not. We set up lightweight, cookieless analytics that tell you what matters, and we leave out everything that exists only to fill a dashboard nobody checks.
If your current site is running Google Analytics and you are not sure whether you need it, we can help you work that out. Often the answer is simpler than you think. And if you do need detailed tracking for advertising or marketing campaigns, we can set that up properly too, so the data actually serves a purpose.