Notes from Galytics

Here is a question most website owners cannot answer: what does your site do to a visitor who has not clicked anything yet?

You probably think you know. But your own browser said yes to your cookie banner months ago, so every time you visit your own site, you see the version for someone who has already agreed. The first-time visitor's version, the one the consent rules are actually about, is the one you never see.

So we built a scanner that shows it to you. It is free, it needs no sign-up, and it lives ...

An analytics dashboard is only worth opening if you believe what it says. Over the past weeks we have gone through Galytics metric by metric, from the tiles at the top of the dashboard down to the individual queries behind them, and rebuilt the parts that could be sharper. The result is a dashboard that reports on your clock, answers more of the questions you actually have, and loads noticeably faster.

Here is what is new.

Which traffic is worth having

Traffic volume is the easy half of the ...

Most analytics tools tell you how many people visited a page. Fewer tell you whether those people actually read it. That gap is where scroll depth tracking comes in, and it is one of the most underrated signals available to anyone who publishes content on the web.

What is Scroll Depth?

Scroll depth measures how far down a page a visitor scrolls, expressed as a percentage of the total page height. A scroll depth of 25% means the visitor barely glanced at the top of the page before leaving. A scroll ...

If you’ve ever opened a website analytics dashboard, you’ve probably seen three numbers right away:

Users. Sessions. Pageviews.

They sound similar. They often get confused. And many website owners have no idea what they actually mean.

Let’s break them down in plain English.

Why these three metrics matter

Together, users, sessions, and pageviews tell the story of:

• How many people visit your website
• How often they come back
• How much content they view

Understanding the difference ...

If you own a website, you’ve probably heard people talk about website metrics, analytics, and KPIs. It often sounds complicated – charts, percentages, funnels and strange terms that only marketers understand.

In reality, website metrics are simply numbers that tell you how your website is performing. They show you what works, what doesn’t, and where you are losing visitors.

This guide explains website metrics in plain language – no marketing jargon required.

What are website ...

There is no shortage of advice on getting traffic. There is a serious shortage of advice on working out which of it worked, which is why so many sites do five things at once and then argue about which one mattered.

This is both halves: what tends to work, and what you need in place to know.

Write the pages people are actually looking for

The single most common problem is not quality, it is that a site has nothing on it matching what anyone types into a search box. A homepage, a pricing page and an ...

A conversion is whatever you would be pleased to see a visitor do. That definition is doing more work than it looks, because most conversion tracking goes wrong at the point of deciding what to count, not at the point of implementing it.

Pick the thing that changes a decision

The test is simple: if this number moved, would you do anything differently? If not, do not track it.

"Visited the pricing page" fails that test for most sites. It moves with traffic, so it tells you what your traffic did, ...

You have installed analytics, data is arriving, and the dashboard has more numbers on it than you have decisions to make. That is the normal first week. Here is a short list of what is worth your attention, roughly in order, and what you can leave alone until later.

1. Where people come from

Open the sources panel before anything else. Not because traffic volume is the most important thing, but because everything else makes more sense once you know who you are looking at. Readers who arrived from a ...

"Cookieless analytics" gets said a lot and explained rarely, which makes it sound like either magic or marketing. It is neither. Here is what the cookie was actually doing, what takes over when you remove it, and which of your numbers get less certain as a result.

What the cookie was for

Almost nothing in analytics needs a cookie. A pageview does not: the request itself tells you the URL, the referrer, the rough location and the user agent. You can count pageviews forever without storing anything ...