1 in 4 moving company owners have no idea whether their website is bringing in customers. They paid someone to build it, it looks fine, the phone rings sometimes — but they can't tell if the site is responsible for any of it. We analyzed over 18,000 moving company websites and found that one in four has no analytics installed at all. No way to measure traffic, no way to see where visitors come from, no way to know if the marketing is working.
If you just had a website built — or you've had one for years and never checked — this is the article you need to read before spending another dollar on moving company marketing. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. And right now, the average moving company website is invisible to its own owner.
What the Data Actually Shows
We scanned 18,247 active moving company websites and checked each one for analytics installations. Here's what we found:
- 4,536 sites (24.2%) had zero analytics of any kind. No GA4, no UA, no Tag Manager, no third-party tracking. Nothing.
- 5,729 sites (31.4%) had active Google Analytics 4 — the current standard.
- 1,673 sites (9.2%) were still running Universal Analytics (UA) — which Google shut down in July 2023. These sites have had no working data for nearly two years.
- The remainder used Tag Manager containers, partial setups, or third-party tools like Hotjar and Facebook Pixel without a primary analytics property.
Add the zero-analytics and dead-UA groups together and you get roughly one in three moving company websites flying completely blind.
Dead Universal Analytics Is a Separate Problem
Google sunset Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023. After that date, UA properties stopped collecting data entirely. The tracking code still fires — it just sends information to a server that no longer accepts it.
This means if your site has a UA tag and nothing else, you haven't had real traffic data since mid-2023. The tag is still there. Your developer or website builder put it in years ago and no one has touched it since. It looks like it's working. It isn't.
The companies in this group often believe they have analytics. They log in to Google Analytics occasionally, see an old interface, assume things are fine. They aren't looking at current data, they're looking at a frozen snapshot from before the cutoff.
What You're Missing Without Working Analytics
Here is what a moving company with GA4 properly installed can see that you can't:
- Which cities are sending traffic. Knowing where your visitors come from tells you where demand for your services actually exists, so you can put more effort into the markets already working and stop guessing about the ones that aren't.
- Which pages lose people. If visitors hit your pricing page and leave immediately, something on that page is killing your conversions. Without data, you'll never know.
- Which search terms bring people in. Paired with Google Search Console, GA4 shows what keywords people used to find you, so you know what's actually ranking.
- Where your leads drop off. If you have an online quote form, you can see exactly what percentage of visitors started it versus finished it. A 20% completion rate means 80% of interested customers are leaving without contacting you.
- Whether your site is getting better or worse over time. Month-over-month traffic trends show whether what you're doing is working.
Without analytics, every decision about your website is a guess. With it, you have actual numbers to act on.
The Fix Takes 15 Minutes
Google Analytics 4 is free. Sign in with any Google account, create a property for your website, and you get a measurement ID that looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX. Add that ID to your site and GA4 starts collecting data immediately.
If your site runs on WordPress, the "Site Kit by Google" plugin handles the whole setup without touching code. For custom sites, paste the GA4 snippet into your page's <head> tag. Wix, Squarespace, and Wix, Squarespace, and similar website builders have a dedicated field for Google Analytics IDs under their settings.
If you're not sure what you currently have installed, open your site in Chrome, right-click, and select "View Page Source." Search the page for "G-" (GA4 format) or "UA-" (old Universal Analytics). If you only find a UA tag, you need to create a new GA4 property and replace it.
This is not a complex project. It's a 15-minute task that gives you years of data going forward.
How to Check If Your Moving Company Website Is Getting Any Traffic
Once GA4 is installed, open Google Analytics and go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition. Set the date range to the last 30 days. Three numbers tell you almost everything right away.
Total users. For a local moving company serving one metro area, 200–800 monthly users is a reasonable baseline. Under 50 means your site has almost no organic visibility. Over 2,000 in a single market means you're doing something right, or you're in a high-demand city with strong existing rankings.
Where they're coming from. If 80% of your traffic is Direct, people who already know your name are typing your URL in directly. That's fine for existing customers. It means you are not being found by anyone new. Organic Search is the channel that grows your business. If it's near zero, your site is not working as a marketing tool.
Which pages they're landing on. If 90% of visitors hit your homepage and bounce, your site is a digital business card, not a lead generator. A moving company website that actually converts has traffic landing on service pages, city-specific pages, and a quote or contact page. If those pages get no traffic, no one is finding them.
What to Look at in GA4 Each Week
Traffic by city, where is your demand actually coming from?
Go to Reports → Demographics → Geographic Overview and filter to City. This report shows you where your website visitors are located when they find you. It is the highest-leverage report analytics gives you because it tells you where real demand exists for your services. If one city is sending you three times the traffic of everywhere else, that is a signal worth acting on, more content targeting that market, more Google Business presence there, more ad spend if you run paid search. Without analytics, you would never see that pattern. You would treat every market the same and miss the ones already working in your favor.
Your contact or quote page, where interested visitors drop off
In GA4, go to Reports → Engagement → Pages and Screens and find your quote request page or contact form. Look at Average Engagement Time. Under 20 seconds on that page means people are landing on it and leaving before they do anything. Something is pushing them away, the form is too long, the page loads slowly, the price isn't clear, or the page doesn't load right on mobile. That single page is where your marketing either closes or fails. Fixing it is higher leverage than any ad campaign.
How Analytics Changes Your Moving Company Marketing Decisions
Without data, moving company marketing is guesswork. You don't know whether to spend more on Google Ads or put that money into SEO. You don't know if the $200 per month Angi listing is sending anyone. You don't know if the city pages you paid a freelancer to write are ranking for anything. Every decision is based on feel, not feedback.
With GA4 running for 60 days, that changes. You can see which channels are actually sending traffic and which are sending nothing. You can identify which pages people read versus which ones they skip in seconds. You can stop paying for marketing that shows no signal and put more behind what's working.
Moving company marketing strategies only get sharper when you have feedback. The operators who grow from $1M to $3M aren't necessarily running more marketing, they know what's converting. In our work with growing operators, the habit that separates the ones who scale from the ones who stall is a 10-minute weekly check of three GA4 reports. They can see that organic search drives 60–70% of their booked jobs, so they invest in content and local SEO. They can see that one city page outperforms all the others, so they build five more like it. That visibility comes from analytics. Without it, you're spending the same budget as your competitors but learning nothing.
Analytics Is Table Stakes for Any Other Marketing Work
SEO, paid ads, website redesigns, none of that work is measurable without analytics in place first. Search engine optimization for moving companies requires knowing what's already driving organic traffic so you can build on it instead of guessing. Ad spend needs conversion tracking to know which campaigns are generating calls. A website redesign without before-and-after data is just a visual change with no business justification.
Analytics is the foundation. If it's missing, every other marketing investment is harder to evaluate and easier to waste. A Milestone Inc. analysis of 500+ location-based business websites found organic search and local Maps together drive 69% of digital traffic, yet 1 in 3 moving companies have no way to see any of it.
Source: Milestone Inc.. 500+ location-based business websites, 63 million sessions. Without analytics, every one of these numbers is invisible to you.
Set it up before you spend another dollar on anything else.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Google Analytics 4 free for moving companies?
Yes, completely free. You sign in with any Google account, create a property for your website, and copy one code snippet into your site. There is no paid tier required for anything a moving company needs, session tracking, traffic sources, page performance, and geographic data are all included at no cost. The only time you pay for analytics is if you upgrade to Google Analytics 360, which is an enterprise product that costs over $50,000 per year and is designed for companies processing tens of millions of sessions monthly. You do not need it.
What is the difference between GA4 and Google Search Console?
They answer different questions. GA4 tells you what happens on your website, the number of visitors, where they came from, what pages they viewed, how long they stayed. Google Search Console tells you what happens before people click, what search terms your site is appearing for, how often your pages show up in Google results, and whether Google has any issues crawling your pages. You need both. GA4 without Search Console means you know traffic came from Google but not which keywords drove it. Search Console without GA4 means you know people clicked through to your site but not what they did once they arrived. Setting up both takes about 30 minutes total and gives you a complete picture of your moving company's search presence.
Does GA4 track phone calls from my moving company website?
Not automatically. GA4 tracks page views and clicks out of the box. If someone sees your phone number on the page and dials it directly, that call does not appear in GA4 by default. To track calls, you have two main options. If you are running Google Ads, call extensions with call tracking are built in. If you are not running ads, a service like CallRail assigns a unique tracking number to your website, every call that comes through that number gets logged with the source that drove it, so you know whether the caller came from organic search, Google Ads, or a directory listing. For a $1M–$5M moving company, CallRail or a similar service is the missing piece between knowing your website gets traffic and knowing your website generates revenue.
When leads start coming in, close them faster.
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