A website is working if it produces enquiries at an acceptable cost and rate. Traffic, pageviews, time on site and bounce rate tell you almost nothing on their own. The four numbers worth tracking are: enquiries per month, the percentage of visitors who enquire, where those enquiries come from, and which pages produce them. All four are free to measure, and most small businesses have never looked at any of them.
First, Define What Counts as Success
Before touching any tool, finish this sentence: this website is doing its job if someone…
For most New Zealand small businesses the answer is one of:
- Submits the contact or quote form
- Taps the phone number to call
- Books an appointment
- Buys something
- Joins the mailing list
Pick the one that genuinely leads to revenue and treat it as your primary measure. Everything else is secondary. If you cannot name it, no amount of analytics will help — you will be staring at charts with no idea whether they are good.
Step 1: Set Up the Two Free Tools
These do different jobs and you want both.
Google Analytics 4
Tells you what happens on your site: how many people arrive, where from, what they do, and how many complete the action you care about.
Google Search Console
Tells you what happens before people arrive: which searches you appear for, how often you are clicked, and which pages Google has indexed. It is also where Google reports problems directly to you.
If you only have appetite for one, start with Search Console — it is simpler, and it answers "can Google even see me?", which is a more fundamental question.
Step 2: Make Sure Your Conversions Are Actually Tracked
This is the step that gets skipped, and without it the rest is decoration. Analytics installed with default settings records visits but does not necessarily record the thing you actually care about.
You need to explicitly track:
- Form submissions. Mark the successful submission as a conversion event, not merely a visit to the contact page. Someone landing on your contact page and leaving is not an enquiry.
- Phone taps. On mobile, most enquiries for trades and services are taps on a phone link, not form fills. If your number is not a tappable link, make it one — then track the tap.
- Booking or checkout completion, if you have one.
Then test it yourself. Submit your own form, tap your own number, and confirm the event appears in the real-time report. A conversion setup nobody has tested is usually a conversion setup that does not work.
Step 3: The Four Numbers
1. Enquiries per month
The headline number. Track it monthly, not daily, and compare against the same month last year where you can — most NZ businesses have real seasonality, and comparing July with December tells you about the calendar rather than the website.
2. Conversion rate
Enquiries divided by visitors. This is the number that tells you whether the website is the problem or the traffic is.
If you have plenty of visitors and almost no enquiries, the site is failing to convince — that is a content, clarity, speed or trust problem. If your conversion rate is healthy but visitors are scarce, the site is fine and you have a visibility problem. Those two situations call for completely different work, and conversion rate is what distinguishes them.
Resist benchmarking against published industry averages. They aggregate wildly different businesses and traffic mixes. Your own trend over time is the useful comparison.
3. Where enquiries come from
Group your traffic by channel — organic search, your Google Business Profile, paid ads, social, direct, referral — and look at which channels produce enquiries, not which produce visits. These are frequently different, and the gap is where budget gets wasted.
A channel sending 2,000 visits and two enquiries is worth less than one sending 100 visits and eight.
4. Which pages produce enquiries
Usually a small number of pages do nearly all the work. Find them, then improve them rather than spreading effort evenly. It is also worth knowing which pages get traffic but produce nothing — those are your best candidates for rewriting.
Step 4: Read Search Console for Unmet Demand
The performance report shows the actual searches that surfaced your site. Two patterns are worth hunting for:
- High impressions, low clicks. You are appearing but not being chosen. Usually a title and description problem, and one of the cheapest fixes available.
- Queries you appear for but have no page about. Genuine demand you are only accidentally serving. That is your content roadmap, written by your customers.
Step 5: Review on a Sensible Cadence
Monthly is right for most small businesses. Weekly is noise. Daily is anxiety.
Bear in mind Google's own advice on timeframes: some changes take effect within hours, others take months, and it recommends waiting a few weeks before assessing whether work had an effect. Judging a change after four days will mislead you in both directions.
A workable monthly review: enquiries this month versus last and versus the same month last year; conversion rate trend; top three channels by enquiries; top three pages by enquiries; anything Search Console is complaining about. Fifteen minutes, once a month.
Metrics to Largely Ignore
- Pageviews and sessions alone. Volume without outcome. A traffic spike from an irrelevant audience is not progress.
- Time on page, read in isolation. A long visit can mean engagement or confusion. It cannot tell you which.
- Bounce rate, as commonly misused. Someone who lands on your contact page, reads your phone number and calls you has a great outcome and may register as a bounce.
- Keyword ranking screenshots. Results vary by location, device and personalisation. Clicks and enquiries are what actually happened.
- Third-party "SEO scores". A number invented by a tool vendor. Search Console is the source that matters.
Common Mistakes
- Measuring traffic instead of enquiries. The most common and most expensive error.
- Never testing the tracking. Submit your own form and check the event fires.
- Not tracking phone taps. For trades and services this is often the majority of real enquiries, invisible by default.
- Comparing month to month without accounting for seasonality. Compare with the same month last year.
- Reacting to single data points. One quiet week is weather, not climate.
- Not counting offline enquiries. If people ring after seeing your site, ask how they found you and write it down. It is crude and it is better than nothing.
Do This Today
- Write down the single action that means your website worked
- Set up Google Search Console if you have not, and check the indexing report
- Confirm your phone number is a tappable link on mobile
- Set up conversion tracking for form submissions and phone taps
- Test both yourself and confirm they register
- Write down this month's enquiry count so you have a baseline
- Diarise a fifteen-minute review for the same date next month
Where We Come In
Setting up Search Console and basic conversion tracking is a genuinely doable afternoon, and the numbers are more useful when you have looked at them yourself. Where we tend to help is the diagnosis after the numbers arrive — specifically the case where traffic is fine and conversion is not, which is almost always a site problem rather than a marketing one. Our free website audit checks the technical side, and our SEO calculator helps sanity-check whether the numbers you are seeing justify further investment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good conversion rate for a small business website?
Published industry averages are close to useless because they aggregate very different businesses and traffic mixes. The comparison that matters is your own site over time. What conversion rate is genuinely useful for is diagnosis: strong traffic with few enquiries points at the website, while few visitors but a healthy conversion rate points at visibility.
Do I need Google Analytics, or is Search Console enough?
They answer different questions. Search Console tells you what happens before someone arrives — which searches you appear for and whether Google can index you. Analytics tells you what happens on the site, including whether visitors convert. If you can only manage one, start with Search Console.
How do I track phone calls from my website?
Make your phone number a tappable link, then record the tap as a conversion event in your analytics. This matters enormously for trades and service businesses, where phone taps often outnumber form submissions and are invisible with default analytics settings.
Why does my website get traffic but no enquiries?
Usually one of four things: the traffic is the wrong audience, the page does not clearly say what you do and where, the site is too slow or awkward on a phone, or the next step is unclear or buried. Check which pages the traffic lands on and whether those pages actually ask for anything.
How often should I check my website analytics?
Monthly for most small businesses. Weekly reviews mostly surface noise, and daily checking encourages reacting to randomness. Google itself advises waiting a few weeks before assessing whether a change had an effect, since some take hours and others take months.
Next in this series: How to Choose a Web Designer in New Zealand.