The four numbers that tell you if your website is working

Why is traffic the wrong place to start?

A month where 4,000 people visit and nobody rings is worse than a month where 600 visit and eleven do. Traffic measures how many people arrived. It says nothing about whether they were the right people, or whether your site gave them a reason to act.

Traffic is also the easiest number to lift without helping your business. A blog post that ranks for something unrelated to what you sell will raise your visitor count and change nothing about your revenue.

Which four numbers actually matter?

These four, in this order. Each one answers a question the one above it raises.

• Enquiries per month. Form submissions, phone taps and bookings added together. This is the only number tied directly to revenue, so it goes first.
• Conversion rate. Enquiries divided by sessions. For a service business, somewhere between one and three percent is a common range, and well under that usually points at the page rather than the traffic.
• Where those enquiries came from. Organic search, Google Maps, paid, direct or referral. Without this you can't tell which of your efforts is doing the work.
• Clicks for the searches you'd want to win. Not rankings — clicks, from Search Console, for the terms someone with money would actually type.

How do you set this up without a developer?

Two free tools cover all four. Google Analytics 4 handles enquiries, conversion rate and sources. Search Console handles the search side. Both take an afternoon.

In GA4, mark your thank-you page view and your tel: link taps as key events. Phone taps matter more than most NZ service businesses realise — for tradies and clinics the phone is still where most of the work comes from, and an untracked tel: link makes a site look like it's failing when it isn't.

• Tag the form thank-you page. A key event on the page someone lands on after submitting, rather than on the button click.
• Tag phone and email taps. Any tel: or mailto: link on the site, especially the one in your header.
• Connect Search Console to GA4. It puts search queries and clicks next to behaviour, in one place.
• Set a monthly email report. Both tools will send one. If it lands in your inbox you'll actually look at it.

What should you expect from whoever manages your site?

A monthly report of one page. Enquiries this month, the same month last year, where they came from, and one sentence on what changed and what happens next. Anything longer is usually padding.

Be wary of two things: reports that lead with rankings for terms nobody searches, and reports where a bad month arrives without an explanation. Bad months happen. A good partner tells you why.

How long before the numbers mean anything?

Give it three months before you draw conclusions, and always compare like with like. Most NZ businesses are seasonal in ways that wreck month-on-month comparisons — a Queenstown operator's January and a Dunedin accountant's April aren't comparable to the months sitting next to them. Compare against the same month last year instead.

If you don't have last year's data because tracking was never set up, start now and accept that the first useful read is twelve months away. That's a good reason to set it up before a rebuild rather than after.

You don't need a dashboard with forty charts. You need four numbers you trust and the habit of looking at them on the same day each month. If you'd rather have someone set the tracking up properly and hand you a report you can read in a minute, that's part of our data and analytics work. Either way, get it running before you change anything else on the site.