Google Analytics is a God send to all website owners, however for newbies, it can look complicated and intimidating. We get it. We’ve been there. But we have a solution for you that can turn you from amateur to professional and curb your learning curve. Google Analytics dashboards.
What is a Google Analytics Dashboard?
A Google Analytics Dashboard is simply a collection of widgets that allow you to quickly visualize your data. You can have up to 20 dashboards with 12 widgets in each for each view/property in your Google Analytics account.
In other words, a customized dashboard that gives you a clear snapshot of your website performance. The great thing about dashboards is that you don’t have to create them. People more knowledgeable about Google Analytics can create them and share them with you. All you then need to do is to download these customized dashboards to your Google Analytics profile.
How can you download Google Analytics Dashboards?
Installing these dashboards into your google analytics is pretty simple. Here are the steps:
- Make sure you are signed in to your Google Analytics account
- Click the Add This Dashboard to your Google Analytics button located under the specific dashboard you want to add.
Here’s what you might see:
- Select the profile and view you would like to install the dashboard to and feel free to rename it!
- Click Create.
That’s it. You now have a dashboard in your Analytics account.
How to access your customized dashboards in Google Analytics?
You’ve installed your dashboard into Google. Now how do you access it? Simple. Go to Customisation => Dashboards.
So where can I find these dashboards?
People have been able to build Google Analytics Dashboards and share them for a while now. In fact, it’s gotten so out-of-hand there’s now a niche dashboard site called dashboard junkie dedicated just to the Google Analytics dashboard.
To get more details about Google Analytics dashboards, start at the about dashboards page. From there, you can learn how to build your own dashboards.
However, if you’d rather have instant gratification, here are some links to some to get you started.
Gender Insights Dashboard
- Are your website visitors male or female?
- What types of content attract which genders?
- Are your male or female visitors most valuable?
- How old are your male and female visitors?
Social Media Dashboard
- Keeping on top of social referrals
- Identifying most effective social channel for your business (where to invest your effort)
eCommerce Revenue Dashboard
- Monitoring eCommerce activity (sales, revenue etc)
- Recognising busy/slow periods of business
- Increasing business efficiencies
Mobile eCommerce Dashboard
- Monitoring mobile eCommerce activity (sales, revenue etc)
- Recognising what the bounce rate is from different mobile devices
- Understanding what proportion of revenue is generated from mobile
SEO Dashboard
- Monitoring your overall organic search reach
- Recognising the top landing pages from organic search (including goal completions/conversions)
- Understanding the most valuable organic search keywords to your site
Tech Dashboard
- Sharing with your tech department (just see the looks on their faces when they’re able to access this depth of information!)
- Viability analysis for future technical releases – I have used top level data from this dashboard to help inform the scheduling of technical changes to a site. Understanding whether or not, and to what extent users are accessing using certain technologies can help inform technical decisions, prioritising based on actual data from your site visitors.
General Analytics Dashboard
Get a glimpse of everything: SEO, social, referral traffic and more.
Geography Dashboard
Especially if you’re doing local marketing, you might want to know where your visitors are from.
Mobile Analytics
What percent of your visitors are mobile? Are they on Ipad, Iphone, or Android? Are mobile users finding what they need or which pages are they bouncing away from?
Entrances/Exits
Where do people enter your site, and where do they leave?
Real Time Overview
- Where is your traffic currently coming from?
- What content are they viewing?
Leads
- How many actual leads does your web traffic amount to?
- Which keywords drive the most sign-ups?
- Which referrers send you the best converting traffic?
- What is your best performing content?
