Google Analytics Dashboards

Introduction on Google Analytics Dashboards

Google Analytics Dashboards, a web analytics tool of Google. At its core is has the concept of ‘Digital analytics’. Let’s first understand what digital analytics is so that we can have a better understanding of Google Analytics. In marketing, a purchase funnel (stages through which a customer passes before generating business for the company) of a customer interacting with a business is categorized into 3 stages:

1. Acquisition: It’s the first-time interaction of a product or service with the potential customer. It involves building awareness about the product and attracting the interest of the potential buyer.
2. Behavior: Engagement of a potential customer with the business.
3. Conversation: When business is generated and the transaction is done.

For a business with no online presence (only brick and mortar presence), the purchase funnel is hard to track and optimize. But for businesses with an online presence, we can track this process and understand customer behaviors that lead to purchase. This understanding can be used to target new customers by overhauling our business strategy. An online store could, for example, collect and analyze data of its different marketing campaigns, and accordingly, get a view of campaigns that are more effective and subsequently channel more budget to these campaigns.

Top Tools available for Web Analytics

Here are the Top 4 tools that you can use to analyze your website traffic.

1. 27 Million plus websites are using Google analytics.
2. It offers 500+ unique dimensions and metrics.
3. It’s free.
4. One can create one’s Dashboard from scratch or can utilize pre-built dashboards.

Google analytics helps not only in collecting data from a website, but also behavioral data from systems like CRM systems, mobile apps, and online POS systems to name a few. The data collected is compiled into Analytical reports, which can be used to understand purchase behavior and the journey of customers.

How to Create your Dashboards on Google Analytics?

Following are the steps to follow:

Step 1: Login to Google analytics, expand ‘Customization’ and click on ‘Dashboards’.

Step 2: Click on ‘Create’ and then choose ‘Blank Canvas’.

Step 3: Give a name to the dashboard and click ‘Create Dashboard’.

Step 4: You are now ready to build your dashboard by adding widgets to it.

But, what if a newbie wants to utilize the power of Google Analytics? In such a case, one can easily utilize the prebuilt dashboard templates of Google analytics.

Top 5 Google Analytics Dashboards

Here are the Top 5 Dashboards in Google Analytics

1. Basic Dashboard

This dashboard shows the type of visitors that are drilling deep into the website of a business. Its focus is on bounce rate and session and so gives a good idea of which source is generating more interest amongst the potential customers.

This dashboard helps in answering business questions like:

• Time spent by visitors on the website.
• Sites which are generating traffic to the business domain.
• Geography of the visitors.

2. Brand Monitoring Dashboard

In the era of social media, brands run their campaigns on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and so need a lot of monitoring to see the effectiveness of these campaigns.

Brand Monitoring Dashboard can be used to answer questions like:

• The number of potential customers visiting the website via the brand name.
• The number of potential customers visiting a social media site.

3. Executive Dashboard

This dashboard helps in measuring the stages of the purchase funnel i.e. Acquisition, behavior and conversation. Its ability to measure these 3 stages makes it very handy for decision-makers at the executive level.

The executive dashboard helps in answering business questions like:

• Common sources of traffic.
• The conversion rate of visitors.
• Time spent by visitors.
• The number of potential customers with repeat visits to the website.

4. Digital Marketing Dashboard

It is not difficult to understand that the marketing campaign of a company will not be very fruitful if the company has no idea about the demography, personal preferences of its target audience. The digital marketing dashboard comes to rescue here and provides a holistic view into why exactly a visitor is exploring about the product or service of the company.

It helps in answering questions like:

• Demography of the visitors.
• The device being used by a visitor.
• Time spent by the visitor.
• New or first-time visitors (new acquisitions).

5. Content Marketing Dashboard

Want to know how effective is your content?

The content marketing dashboard shows the pages on the website that are getting the most number of views. It shows the pages that are leading to the conversion of a visitor into a customer and also the pages which have the maximum number of exits (The business will surely have to make it is content more appealing on these pages).

Content marketing dashboard helps in concluding:

• Most popular pages or content on the website.
• Pages leading to achieving the goal (Could be a purchase, subscription or simple data collection of the visitor)
• Pages that are keeping the audience interested and making them spend more time on the website.
• Pages that get most hits by the new visitors.
• Pages that are leading to the exit of the visitor (Last page visited before the person leaves the website).

Conclusion

Marketing campaigns not only have different forms and channels but also have a substantial amount of costs associated with them. A business may want a campaign on social media, text advertisements on search engines or advertisements placed strategically on decided websites. All this with an idea of communicating brand and products to the customers. Google analytics provides businesses with a powerful weapon they can use to optimize their marketing costs by measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns across various parameters.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Google Analytics Dashboards. Here we discuss how to create your Dashboards and top 5 Google Analytics Dashboards. You can also go through our other related articles to learn more-

1. What is Google Analytics?
2. Google Analytics Plugin
3. Big Data Analytics Examples
4. Best Web Analytics Tools
5. How to use Google Analytics?