Central Otago District Council
Council websites have an unusually broad job to do. On any given day, people might visit to register a dog, find property information, or look for information about the libraries and recreation facilities.
For analytics teams, that creates a challenge: how do you measure the many different online interactions and services in a way that’s useful, without creating an equally complex reporting system?
Central Otago District Council worked with Lanalytics to establish a consistent analytics and reporting foundation across its key websites, giving the team clearer visibility of how people use online information and services.
Focusing measurement on what matters
We started with an analytics foundation workshop to understand the council’s priorities and important audience behaviours to track.
Rather than trying to track every possible interaction, we focused on high-value signals like successful form submissions and form starts, contact link clicks, homepage feature interactions and customer feedback.
For online forms, we initially focused on two different services: new dog registrations and lost bin reports.
The aim wasn’t to create detailed tracking for every step someone could take. It was to help the council understand whether people were finding and successfully using its online services.
Finding efficiencies in a complex environment
Our initial scope allowed for custom tracking of two forms, with the possibility of extending the approach if other forms were built consistently.
Once implementation began, we found that the common structure of the council’s forms allowed us to create reusable tracking that could capture successful submissions across many different services.
The same principle helped simplify reporting.
We had initially proposed separate dashboard views for each service area like dog control, rubbish, rates and recycling. Instead, the consistency of the implementation meant we could create one reusable services dashboard that could be filtered by service area.
This reduced unnecessary duplication and created a reporting structure that is easier to use and extend.
Reporting designed for people, not analytics specialists
Alongside the service reporting, we developed a broader website performance dashboard covering measures including traffic, engagement, popular content, internal searches, downloads and external interactions.
The dashboards use clear headings and explanatory information so staff can access useful measures without needing to navigate GA4 or understand its terminology.
The outcome: a simpler view of diverse council services
The result is a more consistent foundation for understanding how residents interact with council information and online services.
The solution isn’t based on the assumption that every council website – or every service – can be measured in exactly the same way. The efficiencies we were able to achieve depended on the underlying website and form implementation.
That’s why we start by understanding both what an organisation needs to know and how its digital services are built.
In partnership with the CODC team we were able to find the clearest, most efficient way to measure a complex digital environment, with reporting that people can actually use.