A business I know well sells online courses and has built up a huge following across Meta platforms. To put that into perspective, for the first several months after launching my own portfolio website, it got about one visitor a month. The first ever “business phone call” that I received was from a little old lady looking for Studio K Salon to get her nails done. (My business is called Studio K Marketing.)
Because their website actually gets loads of traffic, I jumped at the chance to learn GA4 using their data. It actually made the process kind of fun, and I thought finding data analytics fun was simply not in the cards for me.
The 20% that wasn’t
This analysis was from several months ago, but looking back at the data, I found several insights that would definitely count as noise. I won’t bore you with all of them, but a prime example is in the funnel data: the 3 Course Bundle page showed a 20% sales-to-sign-up rate.
Looking strictly at the percentage, a 20% conversion rate looks phenomenal. Look closer at the raw numbers, though, and the calculation was based on just 5 sign-ups and exactly 1 sale.
A single customer’s random decision to buy or click away causes a massive swing in the percentage. If that one person hadn’t bought, the conversion rate would instantly drop to 0%. Relying on percentages from micro-samples like this creates statistical noise that doesn’t reflect true market demand. In reality, this was their poorest-selling product by a long shot.
Cutting the noise
The raw analytics sheet went on for pages of boring, endless numbers.
Andddd since no one asked, here’s the clean summary I ultimately presented to the owner. It cut out about 90% of the noise to focus on what matters most to them and their decisions. (You’ll notice the piddly 3 Course Bundle doesn’t feature, but it is colour coordinated for easy reading ;))
GA4 monthly summary
September at a glance
An online course business. Website traffic and sales, 30 days.
Top pages by views
Free contentPaid coursesCheckout
Business kept anonymous. Page names and numbers have been changed.
To see the full report, you can check it out on my Portfolio page.
A quick note: this is a real GA4 report, so I've kept the business anonymous and changed the names and numbers in the summary. The lesson stays the same.
You can check out my offerings inlcuding GA4 setup under my rates page!