The best website analytics and reporting tools for businesses in Christchurch

Is your website effective? Does it drive business growth as well as it could? It might seem like a simple question, but many Christchurch businesses will find it a difficult one to answer without the right website reporting tools.

The best business websites are never finished – they constantly evolve. On the internet you don’t just compete against businesses in your city or suburb, you compete against every other business on earth. In order to attract more of you target customer, you need to constantly measure, analyse and optimise your site.

You need the help of website analytics and reporting tools.

Web analytics and reporting is the process of collecting and analysing website data (both your own and that of your competitors) in order to improve the effectiveness of your website in helping you achieve your business goals.

Your website generates an incredible amount of data. Improving your website is a matter of processing all that information to reveal actionable insights that can make a real difference to your Christchurch business’s online visibility, lead generation and sales.

Happily help is at hand. If you’re eager to understand how you could improve the online presence of your business, there are a range of solutions designed to do exactly that. But what are the best web analytics tools?

The best website analytics tools can vary depending on the website you run, the issues you face and the goals you hope to achieve. That said, there are a number of tools that almost all businesses will find helpful, which can form a fantastic analytics and reporting foundation that you can then build upon.

What are the best examples of web analytics software? The following six tools are a great place to start.

1. Google Analytics (GA4)

For instant and truly meaningful insights into the performance of your online presence, there’s nothing quite like Google Analytics. This free tool collects and presents a wealth of website data, including web traffic, conversion rates, marketing campaign effectiveness and user behaviour, to paint a clear and comprehensive picture of not just  website performance, but app, Google Ads and marketing performance too.

Google Analytics is the world’s most popular web analytics platform for a reason. It’s free, it’s accessible, it’s insightful, and it has the ability to make sense of almost endless analytics data. The latest iteration, GA4, has been designed with the future of the internet in mind, and will soon replace legacy versions like Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 360.

Setting up Google Analytics for your website is a simple process for website owners, and the tool will soon begin to deliver valuable insights on everything from website visitors to competitor benchmarking.

2. Google Ads

Google Ads isn’t a necessarily a web analytics tool, but it does offer deep insights that allow you to closely track your ad campaigns, learn how to make them more effective, and optimise the return on your advertising investment.

One of the most powerful ways Google Ads does this is by tracking ‘conversions‘ – any action that you want your website visitors to take – which can generate deeply revealing audience insights. Google Ads can also use machine learning to optimise your campaign based on these insights – over time the system learns what works and enhances your campaign to suit.

Before launching a Google Ads campaign you’ll utilise Google Keyword Planner, a Google Ads tool that helps you to create a keyword plan, forecast the amount of impressions, clicks and conversions you’re likely to get based on your keywords and spend, then create an Ads campaign based on that plan.

Pair Google Ads with Google Analytics, and the insights you produce only become deeper and more valuable.

3. Google Search Console

For the majority of people, Google is the gateway to the internet. This means that search engine optimisation (SEO) – the process of pushing your website up the Google rankings – can be the single most important factor in the amount of website traffic you attract.

Google Search Console is a tool designed to help a business owner make their website more Google-friendly. It offers ways to measure the traffic you receive through search, how well you perform against your competitors, the issues you should fix and the opportunities you could capitalise upon.

Google Search Console was originally called Google Webmaster Tools, and this name hints at its target audience – To get full value out of this tool you do need a decent level of knowledge regarding SEO and web development. Nevertheless, as a free tool it’s worth testing out no matter what your level of technical ability.

4. Looker Studio

We humans are visual creatures. Unlike computers, we’re not built to process endless strings of zeroes and ones. Looker Studio (previously Google Data Studio) is a tool that helps businesses make sense of their website data, by allowing you to look at and play with it in any number of visual ways.

As a Google product, you can connect Looker Studio to Google Analytics and Google Ads, then import and visualise all the data that these tools generate. Not only does Looker Studio help you understand website issues and opportunities, it also helps you to easily share these insights and ideas in a way that gets others excited to take action.

As with most other Google tools like Google Analytics, a fully featured version of Looker Studio is available on a free plan, which helps smaller businesses compete with larger rivals.

5. Semrush

Keywords are the lifeblood of Google search. As a website owner you need to know which keywords you should be including on your website, which keywords your competitors are targeting, and how you rank for the most relevant keywords. Semrush offers all that insight and more.

Semrush claims to have the world’s largest keyword research database. This tool allows you to track up to 5000 keywords at once, which are placed in a report that offers up insights like search volumes, search intent, competitor performance, and the difficulty of ranking on the first page of Google for each term.

These insights can highlight areas of opportunity in your SEO strategy, such as relevant keywords in customer search queries that your competitors aren’t optimising for. By starting with a free trial you can check whether Semrush offers value to you.

6. Google Merchant Center

If your Christchurch business has an ecommerce arm, you’ll want to ensure your products and services come up as a result on Google Shopping. You can do just that with Google Merchant Centre, which allows you to promote your products, for free, across Google properties such as Search, Maps and YouTube.

While not a web analytics tool per se, the Market Insights feature within Google Merchant Centre can be hugely useful, as it allows you to track the performance of shopping products (both yours and your competitors), and a wealth of other retail insights that can guide your ecommerce strategy, such as best-selling products by industry and most competitive product price points.

The tools listed above can be seriously powerful for your Christchurch business – but only if you know how to use them. The reality is that many business owners simply don’t have the time to become web analytics experts.

At Traction Marketing we’ve spent years helping Christchurch businesses understand website issues and opportunities and enhance their online presence. Our team has a deep knowledge of and passion for all things digital: CRO, SEO, Search advertising and more.

If you’re looking to elevate your website and broader online presence, to enjoy a greater return on your digital investment, our Christchurch team is here to help. Get in touch today.