Guide · October 2026 · 15 minutes, free forever

Is your website getting 5 visitors a month — or 500?

Most small business owners genuinely don't know. Without analytics, every decision about your website — is it working? did that Facebook post do anything? should I bother updating it? — is a guess. Analytics is a tiny piece of code on your site that counts your visitors and shows what they did. Here's how to get it, free, and what to actually look at.

Your two free options

• Microsoft Clarity — easiest, our recommendation for small sites. Shows visitor counts, where people click, how far they scroll, and even anonymised recordings of visits (watch someone navigate your site like you're standing behind them — slightly addictive). Free, unlimited, and privacy-friendly.
• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) — the industry standard. More powerful, more complex. Worth it if you ever run Google Ads or want detailed traffic sources. Overkill on day one, but it costs nothing to have it collecting data in the background for later.

Either one is fine. Installing both is also fine — they don't fight.

Setting up Microsoft Clarity (10 minutes)

• 1. Go to clarity.microsoft.com and sign in with any Microsoft/Google account.
• 2. Create a new project, give it your website address.
• 3. Clarity shows you a short snippet of code. It needs to go into the <head> of your website. On WordPress: a plugin like "Insert Headers and Footers" does it without touching code. Otherwise, paste it to your web person — it's a two-minute job for anyone who built your site.
• 4. Data starts appearing within a few hours.

Setting up Google Analytics 4 (15 minutes)

• 1. Go to analytics.google.com, sign in, and create an account with your business name.
• 2. Create a "property" for your website, then a "data stream" choosing Web and your address.
• 3. Google gives you a "measurement ID" (looks like G-XXXXXXX) and a code snippet — same deal as Clarity: it goes in the <head> of every page. WordPress users can use Google's own Site Kit plugin, which does the whole thing with buttons.

What to actually look at (ignore the rest)

• Visitors per month. Just the trend. Growing? Flat? Zero? Each answer suggests a different action.
• Where they came from. Google search, Facebook, direct? This tells you which of your marketing efforts are real.
• Which page they leave from. If everyone lands and immediately leaves, the problem isn't traffic — it's the page.
• In Clarity: watch two recordings a month. You'll learn more from watching one real visitor fumble your menu than from any report.

A word on privacy

Analytics counts visits, not identities — but POPIA still expects you to mention it. One line in your privacy policy ("we use privacy-respecting analytics to understand visits") covers it. If GoMarty hosts your site, this line is already in your privacy page.