With the new features that are released every month, Google Analytics becomes a more powerful tool for tracking conversion rates, engaged visitors, content performance and much more. Along with these new features, you can also find the ability to customize and add up to 20 dashboards to your Google Analytics account. However, I suspect that you’ve already tried to build your own custom dashboards and ended up staring at your screen without knowing where to start. In this article I will show you how to get started building your own dashboards and five examples of dashboards that you can implement right now on your account.
Getting Started
First there is one thing that I want to make clear and that’s the fact that every businesses unique. My data is different than your data and even if my dashboards work for me, they might not work for your particular business. That is why I would recommend you to use my examples as starting points, to get started with building dashboards and then build your own dashboards that are customized for your business objectives and goals.
In order to be able to create you own dashboards you need to dive more into Google Analytics; you need to check you account and analyze your data. See what’s working for you, what’s not working and create a routine of checking your data. Then you will be able to look at dashboards and start creating your first dashboard based on your past activity. In time, you will see that instead of spending at least 10 minutes every day to check your reports, you will get the same insights by looking at your dashboards in less than one minute. Look at the reports you check every day and try to get the same insights from the dashboards you create.
Now that you know how to get started and what you need to do to discover what dashboards you will be creating, let’s have a look at some examples I use daily.
1. Basic Dashboard
The first dashboard tells you at a glance how your site is performing in therms of visitors, how many times the visitors have completed your goals, what are your conversion rates, what content gets the most visits and who sends traffic to your website.
You can achieve this by adding widgets to your dashboard. They can be:
- Metrics: Display the exact value of a selected metric
- Pie Charts: Break down selected metrics by specific dimensions
- Timelines: Add a graph of one metric or two metrics compared over a selected period of time
- Tables: Display a maximum of 10 rows with data from two metrics for a specific dimension
When creating widgets you get to choose what metrics and dimensions you will be using, if you want to filter data from that widget, a title for your widget and also you can link it to a report if you would like to do that.
Back to the Basic Dashboard. It contains four metric widgets that provide you the total number of visitors that visited your site in a specific time period as well as information about how many of them converted as Engaged Visitors, Readers or Subscribers to the newsletter.
Next, you might want to check the top performing articles and how the bounce rate evolves for them.
Finally, you will interested to know how your traffic is broken down and what are the main sources that send you visitors so you can keep the level between organic, referrals, direct and campaigns traffic balanced.
2. Conversion Tracking Dashboard
Once you check the overviews, it’s time to dive more into data and check specifics for each section. The most important details for you should be conversion rates and details about how visitors convert in engaged visitors, readers and subscribers over different periods of time. And not only the conversion rates, but also the numbers of visitors that converted, so you can keep tabs on how your content engages visitors and how your subscribers list grows.
For this example I have used metric and timeline widgets to show the data that you will need to look at.
3. Event Tracking Dashboard
Next, if you do not use event tracking already, you should look at its benefits and try to implement it. This example might be tailored just for me, because I use event tracking to see how many visitors click on my ads and which signup form they use to subscribe to newsletter. I consider it insightful because it helps me see how each of them performs. That is why I use pie charts to see how each of them performs compared to each other.
Based on those percentages I will be able to choose what kind of ads to display on my sidebar, their position, see who checks my social media profile, who gets on my RSS feed or what signup form performs best and gives me more subscribers.
4. Traffic Overview Dashboard
One really important element for any website is traffic and that’s the reason why understanding who sends you traffic is gold.
This dashboard lets you see how well balanced your traffic is, what are the main sources that send you traffic and what keywords visitors use to get on your site. A good balance for your site should be around 50% organic traffic, 25% referral traffic, 20% direct traffic and 5% campaigns and other sources. The reason why I am saying this is because if you focus to get only one type of traffic you might end up with no traffic at all one day. Say for example that Google changes its algorithm. What will you do if your traffic is 80% from Google? You will loose 80% of your business. The same applies for referrals, which might remove the links to your site and direct traffic, which are returning visitors who will definitely not purchase your product multiple times.
Next, it’s important to look at your main sources of traffic and see if you get any new entries in that list.
Also important is the organic traffic and the main keywords that people use to reach your website. This data is really helpful because you can use it to better optimize the landing pages and get higher rankings in search engines.
While we are still here, you should also add as a secondary metric, the conversion rate in the tables so you can see not only who sends you traffic, but also who sends you traffic that converts, which is a lot more valuable if you sell products and services.
In case you sell advertising and you are paid for page views, you will be fine with just traffic for now.
5. Visitors Behavior Dashboard
Finally, you need to look at your visitors and see how engaged they are with your site.
The Visitors Behavior dashboard will help you see the recency of your visitors, how many days passed since they last visited, what is the percentage of new vs returning visitors and how frequent they visit your site. Additionally, you can also add there one of your goals and track goal completions or conversion rates.
One action that you should take after looking at this data is to create advanced segments for visitors that come back frequently and repeatedly and analyze their behavior (where they come from, what pages they visit, what is the bounce rate for those pages). Use those insights to make changes on your website and try to convert more visitors to come back to your website more frequently and repeatedly.
What about you?
What dashboards have you created so far? If you haven’t done that already, what stops you?
I would love to hear your thoughts and comments below.
