Most small business owners handle website analytics one of two ways. They install nothing and have no idea if anyone's actually visiting. Or they spend a Saturday afternoon inside Google Analytics trying to figure out what a "data stream" is, paste a measurement ID in wrong, and never open the dashboard again.
Neither is great. For a five-page site with a menu, some photos, and a contact form, you don't need most of what GA4 offers. You need to know if people are showing up, where they're coming from, and whether any of them actually reached out.
Cantrip tracks all three automatically, built into every site's dashboard from the day it goes live. No snippet to paste into a header. No separate account to create and forget the password to. It's just already there.
What you'll see: page views and unique visitors over the last 30 days, which pages people land on, which sites and search engines send you traffic, and how many of those visits turned into a real lead (someone filling out your contact form). That last one gets you a conversion rate, leads divided by visits, which is honestly the only number a lot of owners need to check once a month.
One small detail worth knowing: those counts filter out bot traffic. Every website on the internet gets hit constantly by scanners poking at fake WordPress logins and old PHP files, hoping to find something unlocked. Cantrip strips that noise out before it hits your numbers, so what you're looking at is real people, not a bot fishing for a vulnerability that isn't there anyway.
Google Analytics isn't bad. It's built for a different job, like figuring out which of a dozen ad campaigns actually drove a sale, or wiring up a custom event for every button on a checkout flow. If you're running real ad spend across multiple channels and need to know exactly which dollar earned its keep, that complexity is worth the setup headache, and GA4 (or a Meta Pixel alongside it) is still the right call. You can add either through your site's custom scripts settings if you get there.
But most small business sites aren't chasing attribution across channels. A personal chef, a barber shop, a contractor with a five-page site just needs to know the site is working: people are finding it, and some of them are calling. That's already sitting in the dashboard, no setup required.