The New Google Analytics Dashboard – 5 Essential Widgets

The new Google Analytics dashboard is a killer feature and we’ve come up with 5 essential widgets to help you keep track of your online performance. Now highly configurable, it allows you to graph, table, pie chart or display the metric of pretty much any stat you’d like. Combining the features of custom reporting and advanced segmentation in the dashboard allows for some killer one-stop reports which could be the difference between your boss understanding or glazing over.

We’ve been using the dashboard for a while and here are some of the key stats we like to put on it for our clients:

1. Top-level metrics: overall traffic, bounce rate, pages per visit, goal conversions, sales, revenue, average value etc

We’ve grouped these into one although in reality you’re looking at a few widgets here that will display your core success stats – the final and most meaningful measurement. You might split these out by source or medium depending on what your main focus is at the moment.

2. Branded and non-branded organic traffic

You should measure these separately so you can see your brand popularity in a single metric as well as the success of your SEO. So many SEO companies still report on ‘organic traffic’ as their main KPI, which is crazy, as your real measure of organic success should be non-branded traffic only. Branded traffic is crucial and possibly the traffic metric that correlates most with sales, but its also the sum product of all your marketing, not just your SEO – which is why these two metric need to be measured separately.

3. Average page load time

This one is overlooked by about 99% of Analytics users. You do need to add the following line of into your Analytics code for it to work:

_trackPageLoadTime();

Once you’ve done this, you’ll start seeing site speed appearing in Analytics in the Content section and you can then add ‘Avg Page Load time’ as a graph in your dashboard. Google have publicly put quite a lot of emphasis on page load time as a ranking factor so this is something you cannot afford to ignore.

4. Exit rate of your key inner page(s)

For many sites, getting the conversion isn’t just about bounce rate and conversion rate – there’s usually some inner content that plays a huge part in persuading the user to develop a desire and then finally act on that desire. As we discussed in a recent post, this content is often ignored in favour of simpler metrics bounce rate but don’t forget one of marketing’s most crucial concepts – AIDA:

A – Awareness

I – Interest

D – Desire

A – Action

Your bounce rate will only tell you how much interest you’ve generated. Action levels are clearly measured by conversions but what about desire? This is all about the inner pages, which is why you need to graph the exit rate of these pages and put this info on your dashboard.

5. Blog visitors

If you’re serious about SEO, you need a blog that updates frequently with fresh content, just like ours. Aside from providing a valuable news service to your visitors, the ranking benefits can also be significant – fresh content and more indexed content are 2 reasons why Google will begin to like your site. A lot of companies treat blogging and article creation as a mundane, spammy process purely to please the Google robots – whilst this does help to a point, there’s no substitute for good content that’s well syndicated and bringing in real traffic to your site. Your blog shouldn’t just be a ‘because we have to do it’ function of your website, it should be a real and meaningful interaction with your visitors. More blog visitors will lead to more visitors to your main site content and it’ll also help your rankings – that’s why we think it should be in your dashboard.

We Want To Hear Your Ideas

Above are our 5 killer dashboard widgets but we’d love to hear what you’ve been putting on your dashboards. This is a great new feature and when PDF exporting and email scheduling are (finally) added in the next couple of weeks, the dashboard could be a really powerful reporting tool… and one that could help get your boss onside.