Every once in a while, you come across a piece of information that revolutionizes the way you perform. I had that epiphany the other day in Google Analytics as I was experimenting with custom dashboards, and I want to share these downloads with you. Hopefully you can glean some information about the performance of your website through these custom dashboards that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.
What are custom dashboards?
There is so much data to be discovered in search Analytics, that it can sometimes be difficult to find the KPIs that can prove the value of an SEO campaign.
With custom dashbards, you can segment the metrics you need at a glance to understand how visitors are interacting with your site. All the important information is there in once place, and you can export that data into a PDF report to share with your company’s decision makers.
You can either set up your own custom dashboards in Google Analytics, or you can search for pre-made dashboards that will import into your Analytics profile with a few clicks.
The importance of website Analytics
For humans, introspection is an important component to being effective in life. We can’t ever begin to understand how other people view us unless we take the time for self-reflection.
The same is true for businesses and their web properties.
Analytics is all about discovering and tracking patterns in data, and how visitors interact with the pages, products and services listed on a website.
“One of the beautiful parts of using any clickstream analysis tool is the ability to segment data that provides actionable insight,” says Brian Jensen, an SEO Manager with SEO.com. “Data and metrics presented by themselves really don’t tell much of a story without some point of comparision. By providing this context we can get a better understanding of what’s really happening.”
So, without further adieu…
Here are some of my favorite Google Analytics custom dashboards:
To download these dashboards, open your Google Analytics profile, and then come back to this post, copy the URL for the download and paste it into the address bar. You can download the dashboards directly into your profile.
1. Personal blogger dashboard by DashboardJunkie.com
With this custom dashboard, you can see the basic metrics of you blog, written in plain, jargon-free English. View search terms, screen resolution, links, mobile traffic, visitor locations, visitor source, mobile metrics and popularity of content among others.
Download here >> http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/getdashboard/50
2. SEO monitoring dashboard, by Mike Meisner
Download this custom dashboard to see how well your site performs in organic search. You can view metrics related to non-branded search terms including conversions from keywords, organic visits and organic search referrals.
Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=dashboard&uid=qBF59OdCT26RW9DtjiPbpg
3. Brand monitoring dashboard, by Koozai
I love this dashboard. Are you keeping track of your brand in the search engines? With this dashboard, you can see information like the number of people coming to your site through a brand name search, which social sites are sending visitors and the important hubs for your brand.
[cta button=”Request a Proposal”]SEO.com monitors analytics, while we make your campaign successful![/cta]
Enter your brand name into each of the widgets to track these metrics.
Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=5naWKM71TeChQ2-lyYfseA
4. Social media dashboard, by Justin Cutroni
Track the important metrics from your social media strategy, like revenue, shared content, visitors from social, actions taken, referral traffic and more. This is a great dashboard to show how effective your efforts in social media are, and where to improve your campaign.
Download here >> http://troni.me/GASocialDash
5. Mobile Ecommerce dashboard, by Google
If you want to see how mobile users interact with your Ecommerce site, download this dashboard. You can see actions taken by visitors from social media, the bounce rate and average visit duration, mobile revenue and average order value, bounce rates for specific mobile devices and more.
Download here >> http://goo.gl/W6Wki
6. Site performance dashboard, by Google
How is page speed affecting your visitors’ experience on your site? With this dashboard, you can bring useful data to your IT team, and identify performance issues related to the website or servers.
Download here >> http://goo.gl/oJ2MU
7. [not provided] analysis dashboard, by Google
Technically, this is a custom report (not a dashboard), but is a worthwhile download. You can drill down into the data coming from [not provided] keywords in Google search, and view metrics like bounce rate, % new visits and revenue.
Download here >> http://goo.gl/x6cl5
8. PPC dashboard, by Koozai
See the effectiveness of your pay-per-click campaigns in one, single dashboard. View visits from PPC, impressions, goal completions and CTR. You can also segment the data by campaign.
Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=Q4mOwZEzR9eNFW8Y1Dtv0A
9. Top content & searches dashboard, by Blue Riot Labs
Here’s a quick view at your top performing site content, which is great if you need to pull out some wins for a report. Includes top-visited pages, keywords and top referral sites.
Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=dashboard&uid=7WuTTiykTZGHET_Srztb3Q
10 Visitor technology dashboard, by Justin Cutroni
I’ve saved the best for last! With this report, you can view visitor metrics like traffic from specific operating systems, mobile, browser popularity, screen resolutions, and conversion rates segmented by browser.
Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=C8ug-THUTUeX-OA81X8G3w
As with any of these custom dashboards, you can rearrange the placement of the widgets, edit the data pulled within each widget, or even delete the ones you don’t need within each dashboard. All that matters is that you’re getting the information you need to prove the value of your SEO campaign, and focus on areas of your website that need attention.
What are your favorite Google Analytics custom dashboards? Share them in the comments!
We pull a lot of Google Analytics into our monthly SEO reports already, but the value of these dashboards/custom reports is the on-going day-to-day reporting and ‘worth proving’ which we as SEO’s need to make sure we do. So, thanks for sharing, I’ll be adding a number of these to client Analytics 🙂
Thanks for featuring my dashboard! I have quite a lot more to choose from in my personal profiles, and will have to share more of them.
It should be mentioned that for some of these, some customization is required. For example #2 “SEO Monitoring”, you need to modify each widget that displays “Non Branded” results, to contain the brand of the site you are running the analytics on, as the one provided by Mike are excluding the word “Depot”.
Also the first widget is inaccurate, as it’s set to “Show” the keyword, rather than exclude it, so it needs to be changed to “Don’t Show”, and I find filtering by “Containing” isn’t sufficient – changing this to “Regular Expression” is best, and then adding in the brand name, as well as any variants of it, separated by the “|” (pipe) symbol.
I can see this right here being an excellent resource for many online marketing professionals moving forward! I’ve created many dashboards myself for individual purposes either for a client or a personal website, but these are great! What board will work best, download, implement, done! Nice Job Andrew!*
My pleasure, Mike!
You’re absolutely right, Jeff. Like any campaign metrics and KPIs, the data set should be adjusted for specific situations, and to provide the right insight.
Hey Andrew,
Every SEO see analytics as a great source of data provider about your website on many aspects including provides insights on how a SEO campaign is performing. While there’s always a need of custom dashboards for SEO’s to have analytics data at your fingerprint. It’s an great post with downloadable custom dashboard link. I had enjoyed it and downloaded some of them which I was missing.
Thanks a lot for your very valuable post on analytics.
Regards,
Afzal Khan
These dashboards are very helpful. I’d been avoiding going deeper into Google analytics for quite some time, but now I’m inspired. Thanks Andrew!
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A quite useful and self explanatory information to use google analytics.ore over it is being published in parts to make the user understand well. It seems great research has been done to gather the information. Great effort. keep it up.