Analytics setup for small teams

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Most advice about analytics setup assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What to keep

Data you do not trust is worse than none. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

The practical version

Decide what you will act on before you track it. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What this looks like day to day

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about analytics setup before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Data you do not trust is worse than none — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.