Writing Down Last Year's Numbers First

Before anything changes this year

January is when plans get made: a new site, a few months of ads, a push for reviews, a better photo on the listing.

In December, somebody will ask whether any of it worked. The honest answer depends on whether anybody wrote down what last year looked like before the changes began.

That sounds like something analytics already does. It is not quite, for reasons that only become obvious when you try to reconstruct a year after the fact.

So before changing anything, spend an hour putting 2018 on one page.

Why the dashboard is not enough

Analytics keeps history, but history is easy to lose and easy to misread.

A new site often arrives with new tracking, and the old account ends up somewhere nobody can open. Goals get added halfway through a year, so earlier months show no enquiries at all.

Filters and settings change too, quietly altering what is counted from one month to the next.

Some figures never reach analytics. Phone calls, walk-ins and emails sent straight to an address leave no trace there.

And some sources expire. Search Console's performance report reaches back sixteen months, so January 2018 starts dropping out of it in May.

What goes on the page

• Monthly visits from Analytics, January to December.
• Monthly enquiries from the form and direct email, counted by hand if need be.
• Monthly calls, from whatever records exist.
• The ten most visited pages for the year.
• The five biggest sources of visits.
• One line per month on what happened.

The last is the one that makes the rest readable. A dip in August means nothing on its own; a note beside it saying the shop closed for two weeks explains it to anyone, including you next December.

Finding the figures in Universal Analytics

In the audience overview, set the date range to January 1 to December 31, 2018, and switch the chart to months. That gives visits month by month.

Pick one measure and stick to it. Sessions, which count visits, is the simplest. Whichever you use, write down which it was.

The channels report under acquisition shows where visits came from: search, direct, other sites, social and ads. The site content report gives the most visited pages.

If goals were set up for the contact form, the conversions section has those too. If not, the inbox will do.

Note any month when tracking was broken or missing, so that a gap in the figures is never read as a collapse in the business.

Enquiries and calls, counted by hand

The figures that matter most are usually the ones analytics cannot see.

Form enquiries can be counted from the inbox, by searching for the subject line the form's notifications use and grouping them by month. It is tedious once, and then it is done.

Calls are harder. A phone bill or call log gives totals. Google My Business shows calls made from the listing, but only over a recent window, so that figure has to be copied out regularly.

Approximate is fine. A month recorded as roughly forty calls is far more useful in December than a month recorded as nothing.

A worked example

A florist on a busy suburban street rebuilt its website in the spring of 2017.

By December, the owner wanted to know whether the new site had been worth it. Nobody could say. The old site's analytics had lived in the previous designer's account, and nothing had been written down before the switch.

The new site's figures began in April. With nothing from before, there was nothing to set them against, and the question went unanswered.

Last January, the florist put 2017 on a single page: visits by month, web orders, calls, the pages people used most, and notes against the big weeks, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day among them.

This January, the same hour produced 2018. For the first time, two years sit side by side, with the odd months explained.

Comparing months properly

The page is for comparing a month with the same month a year earlier, not with the month before it.

Most small businesses are seasonal, and January against December says more about the calendar than the business. January against last January says something real.

Small numbers also wander. A month with six enquiries and a month with nine may be the same month with a different week in it, which is why the full year matters more than any single month.

What next December's conversation needs

Every change planned for this year will be judged against something. Without a written baseline, it gets judged against memory, which flatters some changes and is unfair to others.

With the page, December's conversation is short: here is last year, here is this year, here is what changed, and here are the notes explaining the odd months.

It also makes any report you receive checkable, including one from whoever runs your site or your ads. A good supplier welcomes that.

Where to keep it

Keep it somewhere that does not depend on any one account: a document on the business's shared drive, alongside the year-end figures.

Use the same layout every year, so next January means filling in a column rather than designing a page.

And note at the bottom where each figure came from. Next year's version should be counted the same way, whoever does the counting.

A printed copy in the year-end file is worth having too. Paper survives a lost password, a change of supplier and a replaced computer.

The counter-case

Not every business gets the same value from this.

A site with a few hundred visits a month will see figures wander for no reason at all. For that business, the enquiry and call counts are the page; the rest is optional.

A business with nothing planned for this year gains less from the comparison, though the hour still pays off whenever a change does come.

And the page is a reference, not a reason to wait. Writing it down should never hold up a change that plainly needs making.

For most businesses, though, an hour on 2018 this month is what lets anyone judge 2019 at all.

This afternoon

1. Set Analytics to January to December 2018.
2. Copy monthly visits into a simple table.
3. Count enquiries by month from the inbox.
4. Add calls from whatever records you have.
5. List the top pages and top sources.
6. Write one line against each month.
7. Save it where next December will find it.

Step six is the one that turns figures into a record. Without the notes, the odd months will be argued about; with them, they explain themselves.

Whose account last year's history actually sits in is covered in every login your website depends on.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.