You need to track your organic presence and traffic metrics

Effective website analytics tracking in 2025 requires combining Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for behavioural insights with HubSpot for revenue attribution, whilst implementing privacy-compliant measurement strategies that account for signal loss from iOS restrictions and cookie consent requirements. The era of perfect tracking has ended—GA4 now powers 43% of analytics-enabled websites, yet only 23% of businesses report full adoption. B2B companies achieving reliable attribution in 2025 are those embracing probabilistic measurement, first-party data strategies, and multi-platform integration rather than chasing the impossible goal of complete visitor visibility.

This guide covers everything you need to track your website's organic presence, traffic sources, and performance metrics in 2025. Whether you're struggling with GA4 configuration, HubSpot attribution setup, or understanding how privacy changes affect your data, you'll find practical strategies backed by current benchmarks and real-world implementation guidance.

GA4 Configuration and 2025 Benchmarks

Google Analytics 4 has replaced Universal Analytics entirely, with 14.8 million websites now running GA4. The platform fundamentally changed how we measure website performance—most significantly, bounce rate has been replaced by engagement rate, which considers a session "engaged" if the visitor spends 10 or more seconds on site, views two or more pages, or completes a conversion event.

Essential GA4 configuration settings

Most GA4 implementations suffer from misconfiguration that leads to incomplete or misleading data. Before trusting your analytics, verify these critical settings:

• Data retention: GA4 defaults to just 2 months of data retention. Change this to 14 months in Admin → Data Settings → Data Retention to enable year-over-year comparisons.
• Key events: Configure your most important conversion actions as key events (formerly called "conversions") in Admin → Events. Without this, GA4 tracks pageviews but not business outcomes.
• Cross-domain tracking: If your website spans multiple domains (e.g., main site and booking system), configure cross-domain measurement to prevent inflated session counts.
• Google Signals: Enable Google Signals for cross-device tracking, but be aware this may trigger data thresholding that hides some metrics when sample sizes are small.
• Search Console link: Connect Search Console to GA4 for combined organic search and on-site behaviour analysis—this provides 16 months of historical data with a 48-hour delay.

At Whitehat, we configure GA4 as part of our HubSpot integration services to ensure marketing and sales teams work from consistent data. The most common mistake we see is businesses running both platforms in isolation, leading to conflicting metrics and attribution disputes between teams.

Understanding Modern Traffic Source Attribution

Traffic source attribution in 2025 faces unprecedented challenges. Google removed all attribution models except data-driven and last-click in September 2023, iOS App Tracking Transparency reduced attribution accuracy by up to 70%, and "dark traffic"—visitors from sources that don't pass referrer data—now accounts for a significant portion of what appears as direct traffic.

The dark traffic problem

When someone shares a link via Slack, WhatsApp, or text message, or clicks a link in a mobile app, the referrer data is stripped. These visitors appear as "direct" traffic in GA4, even though they were referred by another source. Normal direct traffic—people typing your URL directly—should be 10-20% of total traffic. If your direct traffic exceeds 25-30%, you have a dark traffic problem that's hiding your true channel performance.

The impact is substantial: Facebook's business lost an estimated $10 billion annually from iOS privacy changes alone. For B2B companies, dark social is particularly problematic because decision-makers frequently share content through private channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email threads.

The five traffic sources you need to track

Despite attribution complexity, understanding your traffic sources remains essential for strategic marketing decisions:

• Organic search: Visitors from Google, Bing, and other search engines. Position #1 on Google captures 39.8% of clicks, with the top three positions accounting for 68.7% of all organic clicks. However, AI Overviews now appear in many searches and reduce organic CTR by 67.8% when present.
• Direct traffic: Visitors who typed your URL directly, used a bookmark, or came from dark sources. High direct traffic indicates either strong brand awareness or significant dark traffic leakage.
• Referral traffic: Visitors clicking links from other websites. Quality matters more than quantity—referrals from industry publications and partner sites typically convert better than social referrals.
• Social traffic: Visitors from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. For B2B, LinkedIn generates the highest quality traffic, though actual visit volumes may be underreported due to mobile app referrer stripping.
• Paid traffic: Visitors from Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and other paid campaigns. Proper UTM parameter implementation is essential to distinguish paid from organic performance.

Privacy Changes and Their Impact on Tracking

The analytics landscape has been fundamentally reshaped by privacy regulations and browser restrictions. Understanding these changes is essential for accurate measurement and compliant data collection.

The cookie situation in 2025

In a surprising reversal, Google announced in April 2025 that third-party cookies would remain in Chrome rather than being deprecated as originally planned. However, this doesn't mean the old tracking methods work reliably:

• Safari and Firefox continue to block third-party cookies entirely, affecting approximately 20% of web traffic.
• Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) limits first-party cookies to 7 days when set by JavaScript, or just 24 hours when set from known tracking domains.
• iOS App Tracking Transparency requires explicit user permission for cross-app tracking, with opt-in rates hovering around 25%.
• Consent Mode v2 became mandatory for EU/EEA traffic in March 2024. Basic Mode results in 20-50% data loss; Advanced Mode recovers approximately 65% of lost data through behavioural modelling.

Building a privacy-first measurement strategy

The companies achieving reliable analytics in 2025 have shifted to first-party data strategies. This means collecting data directly from your own website and CRM rather than relying on third-party tracking pixels. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) reached enterprise maturity in 2024, with 90% of users reporting satisfaction and 91% expressing confidence in their compliance capabilities.

For B2B companies, HubSpot serves as a practical first-party data hub. When properly configured, HubSpot tracks the entire customer journey from first touch to closed deal using your own domain's cookies, sidestepping many third-party tracking restrictions. Whitehat's HubSpot onboarding services include privacy-compliant tracking setup that maximises data collection whilst respecting user consent preferences.

Core Web Vitals: The Performance Metrics That Affect Rankings

Core Web Vitals are Google's standardised metrics for measuring user experience. They became an official ranking factor in 2021 and continue to influence search performance—though Google describes them as a "tie-breaker" between pages with similar content quality rather than a dominant ranking signal.

The three metrics that matter

In March 2024, Google replaced First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP), creating a more demanding interactivity standard:

Current global pass rates show significant room for improvement: 57% of desktop pages and 50% of mobile pages pass all three Core Web Vitals thresholds. The new INP metric is particularly challenging—47% of websites fail INP, making it the most common point of failure.

Real business impact

Performance improvements drive measurable business results. Vodafone achieved an 8% increase in sales after optimising Core Web Vitals, whilst Renault saw a 13% improvement in conversions. These gains come from both direct user experience improvements and the indirect SEO benefits of passing Core Web Vitals thresholds. Whitehat's SEO audit includes comprehensive Core Web Vitals analysis with prioritised recommendations for improvement.

HubSpot Analytics Integration Strategies

HubSpot and GA4 serve complementary purposes in your analytics stack. GA4 excels at understanding website behaviour, device analytics, and page-level performance. HubSpot excels at tracking the customer journey, lead source attribution, and connecting marketing activities to revenue. The most effective B2B analytics setups use both platforms together, with each handling what it does best.

Attribution capabilities by HubSpot tier

HubSpot's attribution features vary significantly by subscription level:

• Marketing Hub Professional (£790/month): Provides contact-create attribution only—you can see which source created a contact but not the full journey to conversion.
• Marketing Hub Enterprise (£2,950/month): Unlocks multi-touch attribution with nine different models, including Full Path attribution that assigns 22.5% credit to first touch, lead creation, deal creation, and closed-won touch points.
• Salesforce integration: Bi-directional sync enables attribution across both platforms, but requires careful configuration to avoid data duplication and conflicting metrics.

Avoiding the double-counting trap

One of the most common integration mistakes is enabling both Google Tag Manager GA4 tracking and HubSpot's native GA4 integration simultaneously. This causes every pageview and event to be counted twice, inflating your metrics by 100%. Choose one integration method and disable the other. As a HubSpot Diamond Partner, Whitehat's integration services include proper tracking configuration that prevents double-counting whilst ensuring comprehensive data collection across all customer touchpoints.

HubSpot Prospects tool for ABM

HubSpot's Prospects tool uses IP reverse lookup to identify companies visiting your website, even before individual contacts are known. This enables account-based marketing strategies where you can see which target accounts are researching your solutions, then prioritise sales outreach accordingly. The tool works best for B2B companies targeting mid-market and enterprise accounts with identifiable corporate IP ranges.

Video Analytics and Pipeline Attribution

Video has become essential for B2B marketing—76% of B2B marketers now use video, with 89% reporting positive ROI. Companies using video in their marketing achieve 49% faster revenue growth than those who don't. But these results only materialise when video engagement is properly tracked and attributed to pipeline.

Key video metrics to track

Move beyond simple view counts to understand actual engagement:

• Watch-through rate: The percentage of viewers who complete your video. For 1-5 minute videos, expect approximately 50% watch-through. For videos over 60 minutes with end forms, Wistia reports 65% conversion rates.
• Engagement heatmaps: Platforms like Wistia provide colour-coded viewing patterns showing exactly which sections viewers watch, rewatch, or skip. This data reveals which content resonates and which needs improvement.
• In-video form conversions: Lead generation forms embedded in videos achieve approximately 25% conversion rates—significantly higher than typical landing page forms.
• Video-to-pipeline attribution: Connect video views to CRM records to understand which videos influence deals. This requires platform integration with your CRM.

Vidyard and Wistia HubSpot integration

Both major B2B video platforms integrate deeply with HubSpot. Vidyard's HubSpot integration logs video views directly on contact timelines and enables lead scoring based on viewing behaviour—HubSpot's own BDR team achieved 77% click-through rates using Vidyard video emails. Wistia's integration similarly connects viewing data to contact records, enabling workflows that trigger based on video engagement. Video content embedded in emails achieves 96% higher click-through rates and 300% higher ROI compared to standard email campaigns.

Server-Side Tracking Implementation

Server-side tracking represents the most significant evolution in analytics architecture since the introduction of tag managers. Instead of firing tracking tags directly from the visitor's browser (client-side), server-side tracking routes data through your own server before sending it to analytics platforms. This architecture offers significant advantages for privacy compliance, data accuracy, and ad blocker resistance.

How server-side tracking works

The architecture involves two Google Tag Manager containers working together:

1. Your website's web container sends data to a server container running on your own cloud infrastructure (typically Google Cloud Platform or a third-party host).
2. The server container processes, validates, and enriches the data.
3. The server container forwards data to GA4, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other analytics endpoints from a first-party domain.

Measurable benefits

Server-side tracking delivers substantial improvements in data quality:

• Conversion visibility: A UK retailer implementing server-side tracking reported 7-13% improvement in conversion visibility—conversions that were previously lost to ad blockers and browser restrictions.
• Facebook Event Match Quality: Server-side implementation can improve Event Match Quality scores by up to 88%, dramatically improving ad targeting and attribution accuracy.
• Extended cookie lifespans: First-party cookies set from your server bypass Safari's 7-day JavaScript cookie restriction.
• Page speed improvement: Moving tracking code execution to the server reduces JavaScript on the client, improving Core Web Vitals scores.

Implementation considerations

Server-side tracking requires technical expertise and ongoing infrastructure costs. Google Cloud Platform hosting starts at approximately £90-120 per month for moderate traffic volumes, though third-party hosts offer options from £20 per month. Implementation requires JavaScript coding knowledge, cloud platform familiarity, and ongoing monitoring to ensure data quality. For businesses without in-house technical resources, this is best handled by an agency with server-side tracking experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Key Takeaways for 2025

Need Help With Your Analytics Setup?

Whitehat is a HubSpot Diamond Partner specialising in analytics configuration, attribution reporting, and marketing-to-revenue measurement for B2B companies.

References & Further Reading

1. Narrative.bi - Google Analytics Statistics 2025
2. Google Support - About Engagement Rate in GA4
3. Advanced Web Ranking - Google CTR Stats Q4 2024
4. web.dev - Core Web Vitals
5. NitroPack - Core Web Vitals Strategy 2025
6. Wyzowl - Video Marketing Statistics 2025
7. HubSpot Knowledge Base - Traffic Analytics Tool
8. Google Support - Client-side vs Server-side Tagging
9. Merkle - Server-Side GTM Tracking Benefits