Your agency never set up analytics and you have no idea who visits your site

What analytics actually is

Analytics is a free tool from Google that counts the people who visit your website. It tells you how many came yesterday, which pages they looked at, whether they came from Google, Facebook, or typed your address in directly, and roughly where in the country they are.

It is the difference between owning a shop with a customer counter on the door and owning one where you have to guess if anyone came in today.

Setting it up means adding a small snippet of code to your site. For a developer, this is a thirty-minute job. It costs nothing. There is no monthly fee.

Why agencies skip this step

There are three reasons agencies leave analytics off your site, and none of them are good.

• It takes time they would rather not spend. Setting up analytics, linking it to Search Console, and configuring basic goals is a half-day of work if done properly. On a fixed-price build, that comes out of their margin.
• They do not want you to see the numbers. If you could see that your site gets twelve visitors a month, you might start asking what you are paying for. Better, from their point of view, that you remain in the dark.
• They install it in their own account, not yours. Some agencies do set it up - but under their company Google account. When you leave them, the data goes with them. You never had access to begin with.

The third one is the most common. Ask your agency to send you a login to your Google Analytics account. If they cannot, it is theirs, not yours.

What you are missing without it

Without analytics, you cannot answer any of the questions a business owner should be able to answer about their own website.

• How many people visited last month?
• How many of those came from Google searches?
• Which pages do they actually look at?
• Is the contact form being used, or are people leaving without enquiring?
• Did that flyer drop or local newspaper ad bring anyone to the site?
• Is traffic going up, down, or flat?

You are paying for a website and you have no idea whether it works. The agency, meanwhile, sends you a monthly invoice and an occasional email about how things are going well.

How to check if anything is installed

You do not need to be technical to check this. Open your website in Chrome. Right-click anywhere on the page and choose View Page Source. A wall of code opens in a new tab.

Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for the word gtag or analytics. If you find matches, something analytics-related is installed. If you find nothing, nothing is installed.

If you do find it, the next question is whether you have access. Go to analytics.google.com and sign in with your business Google account. If you see your website listed, good. If you do not, the agency has it under their own account and you have been paying for a site you cannot measure.

What a proper setup looks like

A competent setup includes four things, all free:

• Google Analytics 4 installed under your Google account, with the agency or developer added as a user. Not the other way around.
• Google Search Console connected to the same account. This shows what people are typing into Google before they land on your site.
• Basic goals configured - usually contact form submissions and phone clicks. So you can see not just visitors, but enquiries.
• A monthly summary in plain English. Not a 20-page PDF. Three numbers: visitors, where they came from, how many got in touch.

The reports most agencies send are designed to look impressive rather than to be read. A monthly traffic figure and an enquiry count tells you everything you need; a bar chart of bounce rate by browser tells you nothing.

What to do next

First, email your agency and ask them to send you admin access to your Google Analytics account, set up under your own Google login. Ask the same for Search Console. Give them a deadline.

If they refuse, delay, or send you a screenshot instead of access, that is your answer. The data is not yours and it never has been.

From there, you have two options. Set it up yourself - there are free guides online and it is genuinely a thirty-minute job - or get someone independent to do it as part of taking your site over properly. SkipTheAgency's Maintained plan is £65/month and includes a proper analytics setup under your account, monthly figures in plain English, and direct contact when something does not add up. No graphs you cannot read, no logins you cannot access.