![[Visual] Stock 2 people in office](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/3E6Xcnz962m21VwKbUtyw7/2fb57f4ada18792c86aa38b93e6e0932/5294329.jpg?w=3840&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
You can’t manage what you can’t measure, but too much data can lead to information overload. The right performance reporting software makes it easier for you and your team to track what matters, identify areas for improvement, and share wins with clients and stakeholders.
This guide reviews 7 performance reporting tools perfect for marketing, user experience (UX), and product teams. Choose the right tool to help you collect, analyze, and display qualitative and quantitative insights that drive company-wide growth.
What is performance reporting software?
Performance reporting software refers to tools that collect data and create dashboards of business insights, so you can identify areas for optimization and share progress with clients, teams, and stakeholders.
What performance reporting software measures
You can measure almost any business metric or key performance indicator (KPI) with reporting software, but your focus should be primarily on the KPIs most relevant to your role.
For example, marketing, UX, and product teams may use performance reporting tools to measure and understand
Website and search engine optimization (SEO) traffic: organic sessions, keyword rankings, and backlink acquisition
User and customer behavior: navigation patterns, clicks on specific page elements, and satisfaction rates
Ad campaigns: profitable keywords, click-through rates, and conversions
A/B tests: winning variations and statistically significant results
Conversion rates: purchases, subscriptions, and sign-ups
Churn and retention rates: lost and loyal users and customers
💡 Pro tip: many performance reports focus on numerical (i.e. quantitative) data because it’s simpler to display it in a graph or chart. But, when your business relies on real—human—customers, numbers only tell part of the story.
Quantitative data alone can’t fully capture or explain user behavior and preferences. Be sure to contextualize your quantitative data points with qualitative ones.
For example, you could include voice-of-customer insights. Use a tool like Contentsquare to survey your users after they make a purchase, or interview them about their experiences on your website. This way, you’ll get a complete picture of their wants and needs that’ll add depth to your report.
![[Visual] Post-purchase survey](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/4Ttxw6VQu9fAHneTbk6tEv/688eb330d828d3abfa3477ef07987df4/Post_purchase_survey.png?w=1920&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
Use Contentsquare’s post-purchase survey template to start gathering insights quickly, so you can contextualize your performance report data in customer feedback
Top 7 performance reporting tools for teams
The software and tools below help marketers, UX and product teams collect and showcase performance data so that valuable insights rise to the top, making it easier to spot opportunities and report on what’s really driving results.
Some of these tools help you integrate data from multiple sources (data connectors), while others create dashboards and visualizations for you (dashboard tools), and the rest have built-in performance reports.
You don’t need to use them all: pick the ones that suit your budget and business goals and look for a free trial to get started.
1. Contentsquare
What it is: Contentsquare (that’s us 👋) is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform that gives you a holistic view of users’ journeys on your site. It offers everything you need to report on the performance of your digital spaces, without requiring a degree in data science.
If you’d like to create performance reports that focus on your users’ experiences, Contentsquare will help you gather and analyze all the data you need. Tools include:
Dashboards: collect and analyze quantitative product analytics data
Heatmaps: see where visitors click, scroll, and move on any page
Error Analysis: collect, segment and visualize error data in your digital spaces
Journeys: visualize your customer journey data, including where users drop out
Session Replay: watch real users navigate your site from page to page
Surveys: capture in-the-moment opinions on a specific page or via email
Interviews: talk to customers about their needs 1-on-1
How to use Contentsquare to create performance reports: once you add the tracking code to your website, Contentsquare starts tracking user experiences across your pages.
You can start by creating a custom dashboard that measures only the data points you need for your report. If it’s helpful to your report-writing workflow, you can ‘subscribe’ to it, and receive email updates on your dashboard’s metrics every day, week or month.
Supplement the data in your dashboard with insights from Contentsquare’s other tools. For example, if you’re reporting on website performance, you might like to include heatmaps of key pages, or links to particularly revealing session replays. You could also add takeaways from your survey responses, where they’re helpful for contextualizing your data.
💡 Pro tip: it can be difficult to pick out the key insights from your data so that your report tells a cohesive story. Contentsquare’s Headlines can help.
It tells you what you should be paying attention to right now in your performance data: they’re triggered by a +/- 5% change in your KPI metrics. They refresh every Monday, so you’ll get an overview of what’s new. This is useful for identifying which metrics to include in this reporting cycle.
![[Visual] Dashboards with header welcome Miranda](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/1odByStriHWqrxzNTfzzQ2/f66bbd371446eb895cdb61371096abc0/Dashboards_new.png?w=3840&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
Contentsquare Headlines pulls your attention to your standout numbers each week, which helps give focus to your report
2. Looker Studio
What it is: Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio until late 2022, is a free business intelligence data dashboard that lets you connect data and transform it into interactive reports and visualizations.
How to use Looker Studio to create performance reports: Looker Studio connects with other Google properties (like Google Ads, YouTube, and Google Sheets), SQL databases, BigQuery tables, and over 700 third-party apps like Mailchimp, Shopify, and Matomo. You can use Looker Studio’s free performance report templates to get started.
📖 Case study: the team at Auto Trader, the UK’s largest marketplace for buyers and sellers of vehicles, uses Looker and Contentsquare to monitor their website’s performance.
When they tracked user sessions and actions on one of their digital products using Looker, the Auto Trader team noticed that users didn’t seem to be finding information they were searching for. So, they used Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis—a tool that turns customer journey data into a sunburst-shaped visualization—to understand how browsing sessions typically unfold.
“Because Contentsquare is a more visual platform, it complemented the raw data that we captured in Looker. It helped us see patterns in the data quicker,” says Callum Barker-Nicol, Business Analyst at Auto Trader.
They also dug deeper into their users' experiences by using Contentsquare Interviews to talk to them face-to-face. With these insights, they were able to redesign the product in a way that makes it more intuitive for their customers to use.
![[Product illustration] Interviews - 4 people meeting](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/1pnTF7gILq6ceAdMPr4Mkt/9bfe5c31882dc81eee98b3eee10a8cc3/User_interview.png?w=1920&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
Contentsquare’s Interviews tool streamlines the process of meeting your users 1 on 1, from recruiting and hosting interviews, to transcribing them
3. Ahrefs
What it is: Ahrefs is a premium SEO platform with various tools that measure and report on SEO performance. You can even use the Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to access Ahrefs’ Site Audit and Site Explorer tools for free if you verify website ownership first.
How to use Ahrefs to create performance reports: the Ahrefs Dashboard generates an overview of any website’s SEO performance, including the number of backlinks, estimated organic traffic, and organic keyword rankings.
There’s not much to customize, but if you’re tracking custom keyword rankings, these will show up in the dashboard overview. You can also pull additional data from Google Search Console and visualize it within Ahrefs.
💡 Pro tip: you can also use Ahrefs to view reports on the SEO of competitors’ websites using the Site Explorer tool. This comes in handy if you’re part of a brand or content marketing team and need competitor and market research for your performance reports.
But if you’re on the fence about purchasing Ahrefs to supplement your performance reporting and already use Contentsquare, it’s worth noting that Contentsquare’s Benchmarks feature also shows you how your web analytics data compares to that of your competitors.
4. Segment
What it is: Segment, also known as Twilio Segment after its 2020 acquisition, is a freemium customer data platform for marketing, product, and engineering teams. Segment makes it easier to connect tools to your product or website and send data to any destination for analysis, reporting, and personalization.
How to use Segment to create performance reports: on its own, Segment is not a reporting tool, but it does help you collect data from multiple sources and send it to performance reporting software like Serenytics, SegMetrics, and Cruncher for analysis.
💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Segment integration to connect your Contentsquare data with any data you have in other analytics platforms.
5. Tableau
What it is: Tableau is a premium business intelligence and data visualization software for creating interactive dashboards, charts, and graphs that help teams spot trends in data and product usage.
How to use Tableau to create performance reports: Tableau imports data from many third-party tools and software—think Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Google Ads. You can also pull in data from documents like Microsoft Excel, PDFs, and Google Sheets, as well as databases and any web or product data that’s accessible over HTTP.
From this data, you can build charts and custom dashboards. The Tableau Exchange marketplace has expert-built dashboard templates, automatic data connectors, and extensions to make performance report creation a whole lot easier.
To make good product and design decisions, I look to data from all different sources. Tableau helps glue it all together.
💡Pro tip: view your Contentsquare data—including error data, user events data and data related to website performance—in Tableau using the raw data export feature.
This allows you to store your data beyond the Contentsquare retention period, which can be useful if you’re looking to create very long-term reports.
6. Supermetrics
What it is: Supermetrics is a premium marketing data integration platform that syncs data from several platforms and sends it to popular reporting and analytics tools.
How to use Supermetrics to create performance reports: Supermetrics pulls data from around 100 sources, including SEO, web analytics, social media, email, advertising, ecommerce, sales, and review tools. While many popular tools (like Mixpanel, Airtable, or Contentsquare) aren’t officially integrated with Supermetrics, new integrations are frequently added.
Check out their product roadmap to see which tools might be coming soon.
To create reports, Supermetrics sends data to reporting apps (including Looker Studio, Monday.com, and Snowflake) and documents like Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. The Supermetrics API can also create custom output formats that work with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik.
7. Analytics Canvas
What it is: Analytics Canvas is a premium analytics data connector and reporting tool that specializes in importing Google Analytics 4 reports.
How to use Analytics Canvas to create performance reports: Analytics Canvas reads data to and from popular tools and documents, including Google Analytics, Google Ads, Looker Studio, CSV, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Google BigQuery, and Google Sheets.
Analytics Canvas’ workflow builder allows you to extract data, combine data sets, and clean and transform data before sending it on to the tools we mentioned above. Its drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to design workflows, and you can automate your routine data tasks to save time.
Analytics Canvas also integrates with Tableau to create data dashboards and visualizations, and sends data to Google Sheets, BigQuery, or Looker Studio to create reports.
Choose performance reporting software that tells the whole story
Traditional performance reports are key to deciding where to invest resources and what projects to prioritize—but even the most polished dashboard leaves plenty of room for assumptions, guesswork, and leaps of faith. Whichever reporting tools you choose, ensure your data always paints a complete picture—not just of what is happening on your website or product, but why.
And that’s why we recommend adding qualitative, voice-of-customer insights—from tools like session replays, survey responses, and interview answers—to your performance reports. These add color to your data and come directly from your most important business asset: your customers.