What to measure on a services website (and why you do not need cookies to do it)
The four figures that tell you whether your website works, why visits are not one of them and how to measure them without setting a single cookie or asking for consent.
· Marketing
Almost every services website measures whatever the tool provides out of the box: visits, page views, time on page. They are figures that go up and down without anybody knowing why and that do not let you decide anything. If next month you have 300 more visits and not one more client, what do you do with that?
These are the four that do work.
1. How many visits end in contact
The only figure that really matters: out of every hundred people who come in, how many write, call or ask for a quote. It is what turns «I have visits» into «I have business».
If that proportion is low, the problem is not fixed by bringing in more people: it is fixed on the page. Bringing more visits to a website that does not convert is paying for more people to leave.
2. Which page people arrive through
It is hardly ever the home page. On a services website with a blog, most people arrive through one specific article answering one specific question. Knowing which those pages are tells you what to write more of, and also where it is worth putting a call to action.
The classic mistake is to lavish care on the home page and neglect the five pages 80 % of people come in through.
3. What the arriving visitor was looking for
Not the exact wording — that is barely visible any more — but the type of need. Somebody searching «how much does a custom application cost» is comparing prices and is close to hiring. Somebody searching «what is an API» is getting informed and is not there yet.
Both visits count, but you do not speak to them the same way, and the page serving each one should not end with the same sentence.
4. Whether the page looks right on a poor phone
It is not a marketing metric, it is a business one. Half your audience reads you on the underground with two bars of signal. If the page takes five seconds, that person did not leave because of your price: they left before seeing it.
And all of this without setting cookies
Here is the surprising part: almost none of the above needs cookies. Cookies serve to follow the same person between visits and between sites, which is what personalised advertising requires. To know which pages work and how many visits end in contact, counting events without identifying anybody is enough.
Measurement with no cookies, no persistent identifiers and without storing the full IP address needs no consent banner, because there is no storage on the user's device and no personal data processing to consent to. That means three good things at once: you comply effortlessly, you do not bother the visitor with a pop-up, and — this is the part nobody mentions — you measure 100 % of people instead of only those who accept the banner.
Our own website works this way: it sets no cookies at all, neither its own nor third-party ones. If you open the browser inspector, the list is empty.
What not to measure
- Time on page. It can mean the text is gripping or that it is not understood. You do not know which.
- Bounce rate on its own. Somebody who arrives, finds your phone number and calls counts as a bounce. That is your best visit of the day.
- Followers. They do not pay invoices and they are not yours: they belong to the platform.
How to start this week
- Define what counts as contact: a submitted form, a click on the phone number, a message.
- Measure only that and the entry pages, for a month, without touching anything else.
- After the month, look at the five most visited pages and check whether each one ends by inviting the reader to do something concrete. Almost always, two or three end in nothing.
- Fix those and look again. That is the whole cycle.
If this sounds like you
We set up measurement that answers these four questions and does not ask for consent because it does not need it: digital marketing. If what is needed first is for the page to exist or be tidied up, that is web design, and we cover it in what a business website costs. If the figure you want is not from the website but from the business, that goes through data analysis and BI.
We are Mindset & Code: automation, data and development for small businesses. We apply on our own website exactly what we describe here, which is why we can show it rather than cite it. You can see what we do and what it costs.
Sources: Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, guidance on the use of cookies and the cases exempt from consent; Ley 34/2002 (LSSI), art. 22.2. General guidance.