If you’re a typical website owner/manager or marketer you probably often find yourself clicking through Google Analytics, digging for information, getting buried in data, and then doing it all over again the next time you log in. If you’re a typical business owner with a website, you probably don’t even log into Analytics for fear of being overwhelmed, which means you’re missing out on a wealth of insightful business data.
Introducing the solution to your problems: Google Analytics Custom Dashboards. If you don’t already use dashboards (they’ve been around for about a year) welcome to the world of fast and easy information on your web traffic, to help you make better-informed business decisions.
What is a Google Analytics Dashboard?
When you log into Analytics, the first thing you see is the Standard Reporting dashboard – that’s the one you’re probably already familiar with, and its chock full of template reports of all kinds. Powerful, yes. But sometimes it’s like diving for a pearl, only to throw it back in the ocean, which means you have to dive again tomorrow to get it back. Exhausting!
Dashboards allow you to collect all of your pearls, put them on a nice little string and admire them day after day without having to hold your breath to dive into the data sea.
Dashboards allow you to grab bits and pieces of data from various reports, and collect them all into one simple and easily digestible overview. Even better, you can have up to 20 dashboards per profile, which means you can create specialized dashboards for different needs. Within each dashboard you can have up to 12 widgets (each widget contains a specific report, or set of data, that you specify).
Gaining Insights from Dashboards
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to analyzing your website traffic data. It was designed to meet the needs of the many diverse kinds of websites and businesses that operate on the internet. That means that the template reports you find in the Standard Report won’t always meet the needs for your specific business or website.
Custom Dashboards allow you to pull together data that you won’t find (or won’t easily find) in the Standard Reporting. You can put together data in unique ways, to suit the unique needs of your business.
Part of the challenge of drawing insight from your website traffic data is being able to check it on a regular basis. Using a Custom Dashboard removes a big barrier, making the data you need much more readily accessible. In other words, it saves you time and effort, which means you can do it more often.
Setting Up Custom Dashboards
We won't go into too much detail because it’s straightforward. Google provides a good step-by-step resource here.
There are two simple ways you can add reports to your Custom Dashboard. If you know exactly what report you want, you can click the “Add Widget” button from within your Custom Dashboard, and set it up as you like. The other option is to run your desired report from within the Standard Reporting dashboard, and click the “Add to Dashboard” button to add that report as a widget within your desired Custom Dashboard.
Custom Dashboard Examples
So now you know the ‘why’ and the ‘how’. But what about the ‘what’?
As I said before, each website or business has its own needs. If you haven’t yet set your KPIs, goals, benchmarks and such… think about bookmarking this article, taking a step back, and doing some research on that stuff first.
You need to know what you want out of your Analytics data before you can get anything truly insightful. But here are some suggestions to get you started.
The Conversions Dashboard
This is a dashboard where you can take all of your conversions – contact form submits, e-commerce purchases, or anything else you have set as a goal – and put them all together in one spot so that you can get a quick look at how your website is performing.
Eugen Oprea provided a solid example of a Conversions Dashboard for a subscription-based content website here. While you’re at it, check out his other example dashboards for inspiration.
If you run an e-commerce site, you might want to set up your Conversions Dashboard to focus purely on revenue, number of purchases, top products, etc.
Let me give you an example. Perhaps you would like to know which sources of traffic is providing you with the most goal completions, to help guide how you invest your marketing budget… you may want to add this widget to your dashboard that gives you a nice little pie chart showing Goal Completions by Source/Medium:
But… maybe that’s not the right widget for you. You could make the same type of widget, but instead of basing on Goal Completions, you could use Goal Conversion Rate, or Revenue. Put that widget right next to a bunch of other related widgets, and you’ll have a nice, insightful overview of how your traffic is converting on your website.
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