Small VS Big Websites: Stack, Strategy & Action Plan

The Web Analytics community often talks about big websites…

but what about small players?

They exist and there is a lot you can actually do with them!

Yet, many don’t really acknowledge the key differences between the 2 groups both in terms of Analytics and Marketing.

Minimum Viable Stack

Working with data is expensive… but you don’t have to spend a fortune as a small business.

Be sure to have this:

• Search Console (free)
• Google Analytics 4 (mostly free)
• Google Tag Manager (just the events you need, free)
• Bing Webmasters Tools (free)
• BigQuery (also cheap)
• Dataform (free)
• Looker Studio (also free)

The plan is to use GSC/Bing for measuring organic traffic and get juicy audience data (i.e. keywords).

GA4 is your reference for all the traffic and for tracking what happens inside your website.

Tracking is handled via GTM.

Finally, storage is assigned to BigQuery and its powerful native connectors to both GSC and GA4.

Small websites are affected by heavy anonymization and thresholding and BigQuery gets you more data.

To process data and make them more usable, Dataform is a free solution by Google.

GA4Dataform is great help (and has a free plan) for making your GA4 event data usable.

The dashboard below is built with it since it’s a simple use cases and I don’t wanna do engineering work.

This step isn’t mandatory, many small websites wouldn’t even need processing.

N.B. If you are small small you just need to have GSC and GA4 and your nice custom events/dimensions in GTM.

Growth first, technicalities later but store your data as soon as possible!

Surviving In A Competitive World

So how do we even do in reality?

There are many ways to proceed but I will show you with this nice summary:

Keep in mind that there are meaningful differences between business models.

I hardly recommend small businesses to start with SEO.

The reason is that it’s remarkably slow and requires significative spending.

I’d rather rely on Local SEO that is more accessible (and easy).

P.S. The usual culprits will tell you that SEO isn’t always slow. Yes, if you have an existing brand and resources.

Strategic Differences

Most of what’s to be done is covered in my article about Web Analytics & Strategy.

Small players should exploit their flexibility to attack the weakest flanks of bigger players.

This is why niching down is so effective and big players struggle with it.

They have too much on their plate.

You can become an expert in your niche and end up having more authority and trust than a consolidated competitor.

Would trust this website more than your average B2B SaaS blog talking about “Analytics”?

For sure you would, they are recycling content for views.

Small players have that “amateur”-ish vibe that charms the reader, unlike soulless corporations or dominant players.

Small Websites

Unlike many fraudsters tell you, building a brand doesn’t take some months and it’s not about helpful content.

In fact, content per has little to do about branding.

You need to be:

• consistent
• have a solid positioning
• be memorable

Most small players fail in all. Building a brand requires a lot of effort and years.

That’s why you can’t say “build a brand” as a method to grow as a small website.

It’s much better to consider brand building as part of your daily activities.

With the recent LLM craze, many think traffic is unneeded and visibilty is suddenly more important.

This is surreal.

Both traffic and visibility are needed and I will tell you more: you need multiple touchpoints with your audience.

If you want to learn more I recommend my article on strategy and Web Analytics where I go over some great tactics.

My Realistic Advice

If you have a small website and you are just starting, my #1 advice is to focus on content, in particular original one.

No need to overinvest at the start, just be sure to create your unique angle while experimenting.

It takes some months before you realize what can work as your content.

If you are an Ecommerce, the standard advice may be to focus on your products and categories according to some people.

This advice makes a lot of sense depending on what you sell.

There are shops that don’t need heavy content investments, e.g. you sell keychains.

And there are others that would need to have some articles explaining the products or even how to use them, e.g. domestic appliances.

In B2B SaaS, content is a non-negotiable. The issue is that there are founders who think cheap AI content or programmatic pages can get you success.

This is a hacky shortcut that doesn’t make your brand better in the long term.

I’ve seen a recent example of this based on programmatic pages + heavy influencer campaigns.

Sure, it may work but then people start badmouthing you…

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This is what I also teach in my “Think like a Web Analyst” course. Analytics isn’t just numbers but mostly thinking.

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If you want even more examples, this website is a great one.

Instead of competing for the SERPs, I use a hybrid mix of social, email and pulling branded traffic.

You can say it’s omnichannel.

SEO gets you the most reliable traffic, yes, but saturated B2B SERPs are close to impossible to penetrate…

and it’s much easier to think about brand-building as a whole rather than one source of traffic (aka Google).

The (Mis)Fortune of Being Big

Big websites have some perks but aren’t immune from problems.

If you have worked with enterprise websites, you already know it’s kind of stressful and bureaucracy is the biggest issue.

It’s super common to see a complete mess in GTM with plenty of unused/outdated variables and events.

Paying for tools requires some nice budget as everything is overpriced.

The biggest differentiator is the BRAND these websites have.

You need to put much less effort (or none) to stand out in the market.

This strong positioning can also be deadly as you exclude specific nichea and leave them open to smaller players.

Where To Start

Assess the current situation (as is) which is already a great idea since no one actually documents processes.

This means:

• checking how many data products (e.g. dashboards) are there
• existing processes
• decompose the business model
• understand the logic model

Once you have done all of this, you can simplify what’s there and propose new things.

The worst move you can do is implementing radical changes right away.

Preserving your status quo is much more important then being “innovative” because it’s cool.

Simplify existing situation, dashboards, define metric trees, logic model, etc.

Documentation has a crucial role and here LLMs can massively help with it.

(Be careful about data privacy though. You can’t simply copy and paste your content!)

Complex Stack

Working with big websites require some level of understanding that many miss.

It’s no longer about your silo but it’s about the integration of multiple tools.

We can structure them into categories:

• Data Storage – the most important part. Where you keep your data.
• Data Processing – DBT is super popular but Dataform is also a nice option.
• Data Visualization – for visualizing data and building tech debt in form of dashboards
• CRM – customer data is extremely important in general.
• ERP – this may or may not be relevant to your work. In my case, I don’t often work with ERPs but I have some sparse SAP BI knowledge.

The good ol’ Google stack is also common in enterprise settings.

As an Analyst your goal is to make sure you can extract some value out of this mess.

Here is a common use case to work with:

(Differences may apply based on the business model).

You have a lot of data sources and Web Data is just a part of it.

GA4 is one of the most important data sources out there to be honest but you can’t ignore goliaths like CRMs and ERPs.

Finding the potential connections with all of these tools is key.

I recommend metric trees before as you can use them to focus on what really matters.

If your goal is getting more $$$, then you want to decompose revenue into essential components.

This exercise is cheap and makes more clarity on your business. My friend Ergest Xheblati covered this topic quite some times.

Commonalities

Other than complexity and costs, Web Analytics is the same:

• get data
• find insights (if any and if they apply to you)
• take action

If you are focusing too much on the tech stack, it means you are losing sight of the goal.

I recommend approaching data as an extension of business/marketing so it fits naturally.

If you approach marketing as a standalone activity, it will fail too.

Data professionals reading this may wonder why I didn’t draw a complete data stack…

that’s because as someone with 7 years of struggles with small websites, I know no one cares.

Building complex automation or governance doesn’t have ROI for small players.

You can try the following combinations of sources to get some useful insights:

The depth of analysis will be remarkably different based on business size and complexity.

Remember another detail though, both need to grow and expand via new customer acquisition.

The only difference is that big websites may want to preserve their quota if in a dominant position so expansion may not be so feasible.

AI/LLMs As The Levelers

There is a lot of buzz around this topic for many, many reasons.

It makes sense to talk about LLMs in this context, though.

Take Seotistics as an example, I regularly assist myself with Claude to brainstorm content and prototype code.

The real issue is that people delegate their thinking to the machine or even worse produce content with it.

This is how you lose the war against big players.

A parsimonious use of AI can actually make the difference as big players are busy with internal politics.

Even though a tool available to everyone doesn’t constitute a competitive advantage, it is once you are able to properly use it.

Solopreneurs and small businesses have massive opportunities to outpace larger fishes 👀.

The real gamechanger lies in the method/processes and of course, in your ability to profit from tools.

The lesson today is the same: fight wars that you can win and avoid those you can’t win.