Cool Tool: Easy Custom Dashboards for Google Analytics
If you have a website, then you have a Google Analytics account.
Analytics are vital to gauging both your website’s successes and its failures. Are your visitors abandoning their carts before checkout is completed? Do you have a high bounce rate? Which content is getting the most traffic? What are your traffic sources? These are things that are impossible to know unless you have Analytics.
Analytics are deep, and can be particularly daunting for those who are new, or who are only casual users, or who want specific data. That’s why the best way to get started is to tailor your dashboard to your needs.
Your Analytics dashboard is the “cover” page that summarizes your website’s data. You can choose the layout you want — two, three, four columns, and so on — and you can pick the widgets you want to appear. If you find that your dashboard is quickly getting filled up, you can create another one — up to 20 dashboards per account.
The widgets themselves are highly editable, too. You can select the data type (such as table, bar graph, pie chart, map, timeline) and the metric you want it to display (such as average page load time, actions per social visit, abandoned funnels, ecommerce conversion rate, and so on).
But for those who are finding all of this a little too confusing, or who simply can’t find the time to set up their Analytics dashboards for themselves, you’re in luck: there are tons of pre-customized dashboards out there, all set up and ready to go in just a couple of clicks.
Here are six of the best downloadable dashboards out there for a variety of analysts.
For the Brand Manager
Are you in charge of keeping track of your brand? Koozai’s Brand Awareness Dashboard is where it’s at. It lets you see which social media is sending traffic for your brand and who’s searching for your brand.
For the Performance Geek
Do you lie awake at night wondering if your site is optimized for your visitors? Then you need a dashboard that will help satisfy your thirst for techy knowledge. With Justin Cutroni’s Performance Dashboard, you’ll get an at-a-glance breakdowns of which operating systems, browsers, mobile devices, screen resolutions, and software your visitors are using.
For the E-Commerce Nut
If you need insights into what keywords, referrals, and visitors are bringing in site revenue, then you need the eCommerce Dashboard by Portent. It’s set up to show you sales, channels, and top landing pages, so you can easily see what traffic is the most valuable.
For the SEO Mogul
Traffic, traffic, traffic. The SEO Dashboard by Koozai is all about where your visitors are coming from. It delivers organic visit sources, top organic landing pages, pages per visit by organic keyword — and more.
For the Social Media Strategist
Mike Meisner’s Social Dashboard is a pretty neat way of tracking the success of your social campaign, showing you how visitors have engaged with and shared your content.
For the Personal Blogger
Not interested in technical terms or marketing lingo? Looking for a plain-language presentation of the basics? Look no further than the Personal Blogging Dashboard by Dashboard Junkie. It breaks down sources, content popularity, referrals, and search terms in an easy-to-understand way.
Remember, it’s dead simple to customize your Analytics dashboard to your specific needs — but these downloadable instant dashboards are a great place to start.
Happy analyzing!
