Nine dollars, one script tag, no banner, the four numbers plus goals and realtime on the entry tier, and bots filtered out so your traffic figure is human.
From $9 per month · None, so no consent banner · Full review →
Getting started
Web analytics for a small business
What a small business actually needs to measure, what it can safely ignore, and how to spend either nothing or about nine dollars sensibly.
Small businesses get sold enterprise analytics thinking and then feel bad about not doing it. The dashboards have forty reports, the guides assume a growth team, and the result is usually Google Analytics installed once, opened twice and never trusted.
A small business needs four numbers and one decision. This page is about those, and about the fact that the correct budget here is either zero or roughly the price of a sandwich.
The four numbers that matterWhat you can safely ignoreThe decision that costs you moneyZero, or about nine dollars
The four numbers that matter
How many people came, and is it more than last month. Monthly, not daily. Daily figures on a small site are almost entirely noise and will make you miserable.
Which pages they read. Reliably different from what you assumed when the site was built, and the single most useful thing in the dashboard for deciding what to write or fix next.
How they found you. Search, direct, a referral, or a social post. If one referrer you had never heard of is sending people, that is usually the most actionable fact available to you all quarter.
Whether anybody did the thing. One conversion. Called you, filled in the form, reached the pricing page, started a booking. Traffic without this is decoration.
Everything else is optional. Bounce rate, device breakdown, screen resolutions, browser versions: interesting occasionally, decisive almost never.
What you can safely ignore
Cohort analysis, funnels with more than three steps, multi-touch attribution modelling, custom dimensions, data warehouses and anything described as a customer data platform. These are real tools for real problems that you do not have at this size, and pretending otherwise costs you time you could spend on the site itself.
Also ignore daily fluctuation. A small site's traffic is lumpy, and reading meaning into a Tuesday is how people end up rewriting pages that were working fine.
The decision that costs you money
If your analytics sets cookies you need a consent banner, and a banner on a small business site is worse than on a large one. It is the first thing every visitor sees, it makes a five-page site feel like a corporate form, and the people who decline vanish from your numbers so you are making decisions on a subset you cannot see.
A cookieless tool removes all of that. No banner, no lost visitors, no compliance paperwork about a tool that stores nothing. For a small business this is the single highest-value decision on this page, and it is worth making before you install anything, because changing it later means migrating and losing continuity.
Zero, or about nine dollars
The zero-cost route. If your site is behind Cloudflare, switch on Cloudflare Web Analytics: free, no script at all, no banner, and it gives you real Core Web Vitals as well. Umami's hosted tier gives 100,000 events a month free with no badge. Microsoft Clarity is free at any volume for heatmaps and recordings, at the cost of cookies, a banner and an advertising company on your pages.
The nine-dollar route. A paid cookieless tool at the entry tier gives you the four numbers, goals, realtime and email reports, with nobody else's interest in your visitors. At this price the question is not really whether it is worth it but whether you will open it, which is a question about the dashboard rather than the features.
The route to avoid. Installing GA4 because it is free and everybody else has it, then never configuring it properly, then making decisions from numbers that are missing every visitor who declined the banner. That is the most common small business analytics setup and it is worse than having nothing, because it produces false confidence.
The options, at a glance
| Tool | From | Free tier | Cookies | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Absolutely Analytics | $9 per month | No free tier. A 30-day trial of the exact tier you picked | None, so no consent banner | 8.9 |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Free for everyone | The whole product is free | None | 6.9 |
| Umami | Free self-hosted and on cloud Hobby | Yes, 100,000 events a month on hosted cloud, plus free self-hosting | None | 7.5 |
| Plausible Analytics | £9 per month | No, but the community edition is free to self-host | None, so no consent banner | 8.0 |
| Fathom Analytics | $15 per month | No. A 7-day trial | None, so no consent banner | 7.4 |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free at any volume | The whole product is free | Yes | 5.9 |
The rest of the field
Free, and on a Cloudflare-proxied site it needs no script at all. The right free baseline, though too shallow to answer a conversion question.
From Free for everyone · None · Full review →
Free hosted at 100,000 events a month with no badge required, cookieless, and a clean dashboard. The best zero-cost option with real analytics in it.
From Free self-hosted and on cloud Hobby · None · Full review →
The clearest dashboard here, which matters most for somebody who will open it four times a year. EU-hosted and cookieless.
From £9 per month · None, so no consent banner · Full review →
Fifty sites on every plan, which is the obvious pick if you look after a few businesses or run more than one site yourself.
From $15 per month · None, so no consent banner · Full review →
Free heatmaps and recordings at any volume, which answer the why question. It sets cookies and needs a banner, so weigh it against the section above.
From Free at any volume · Yes · Full review →
Common questions
What is the best free analytics for a small business?
Cloudflare Web Analytics if your site is already behind Cloudflare, since it is free, needs no script and requires no banner. Umami's hosted free tier gives 100,000 events a month with no badge. Both are cookieless. Microsoft Clarity is free for heatmaps and recordings but sets cookies and needs a consent banner.
Is Google Analytics overkill for a small business?
For most, yes. It needs a consent banner, which costs you visitors and data, and it needs real configuration before it answers anything useful. The main reason to keep it is Google Ads: its conversion signal feeds smart bidding and nothing else supplies it. If you do not advertise with Google, a simpler tool will serve you better.
How much should a small business spend on analytics?
Either nothing or around nine to fifteen dollars a month. There is no sensible middle ground and nothing above that price band answers a question a small business has. Spend the difference on the site.
Do I need a cookie banner for a small business website?
Only if something on your site sets cookies or stores identifiers. If your analytics is cookieless and you have no advertising pixels, chat widgets or third-party embeds, you may not need one at all, which is a better experience for visitors and removes the visitors you would otherwise lose to it.
Related guides
How to track website trafficAnalytics without a consent bannerE-commerce analytics softwareA privacy-first alternative to GA4
Everything above is my own opinion, formed from published vendor documentation and pricing read on 11 September 2026. There are no affiliate links on this site and no vendor has paid to appear. Corrections welcome.