5 Custom Google Analytics Dashboards And How To Use Them

Want a more organized way to look at your Google Analytics data?

Custom dashboards in Google Analytics could be the answer. Google Analytics collects a lot of data but if you want to make the most of it you need to visualize it in the way that has most meaning for your business.

That’s what Google Analytics custom dashboards are for. These dashboards provide a way to look at the metrics and dimensions that you really need to understand what’s happening on your site.

Setting up a dashboard from scratch could be a bit of a headache, but you don’t have to. There are dozens of custom dashboards you can import into your Google Analytics profile with just a couple of clicks. Here are a few to start with.

1. Brand Monitoring

We monitor our brands via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social sites – why not do it in our analytics tool too? This custom dashboard from Koozai includes information on:

• how many people visited your site via your brand name
• how many came from the main social media sites
• which hubs are most important to your brand and more.

Grab the brand monitoring dashboard here.

If you’re using this dashboard, there’s a little bit of setup work to do: you’ll need to put your brand name into the widget. Your brand name is essentially a phrase, so in theory you could also use this to track a particular keyword phrase associated with your brand.

Use this dashboard to see how effective your brand marketing is in driving people to your site.

2. Site Usage/Quality Dashboard

Want to have some idea how your site ranks for quality? You might, because it will affect search engine positioning, traffic and more. That’s where this dashboard from Mike Meisner comes in.

This custom analytics dashboard measures:

• bounce rate by browser
• the top mobile devices people are using to browse your site
• page views and bounce rate for your top content,
•  goal sources and completions, browser quality and exit pages.

Get the dashboard here.

Use this dashboard to drill down into the variations in user experience depending on the browser and platform and see how this ties into the conversion rate on site. You will likely find design and UX issues that are driving positive or negative ROI on your website with this custom dashboard.

3. Social Media Dashboard

How effective is your social media strategy? This dashboard from Justin Cutroni will help you to find out. It tracks a number of social media metrics and dimensions, including:

• traffic from social sources
• actions taken by social visitors
• how many new visitors are coming from social
• shared content
• content value
• which social networks are driving the most traffic
• which mobile devices using social are coming to your site
• revenue

Use this dashboard to investigate your social presence online and establish where you are having an impact, what’s driving that impact and how you could improve. Grab this dashboard from Justin’s site.

4. Personal Blogger Dashboard

This dashboard (courtesy of Dashboard Junkie) is ideal for people who want some basic information about their blogs. One of the best features of this dashboard is that the dashboard widget headings are in plain English and not tech-speak. It covers:

• visitor source (new and unique)
• content popularity
• visitor location
• mobile traffic
• screen resolution
• links
• search terms

Grab it here and be sure to check out the detailed explanation of the widgets.

This information is a goldmine for bloggers, because you can find out:

• what you should write more about
• which sites most of your traffic comes from
• how your site looks to the people who visit
• which search engines and sites are most important in your network.

Use this dashboard to improve the value you offer to blog readers and to get rid of the factors that drive them away (such as no mobile interface or responsive theme, for example). See our infographic called How Consumers Use Mobile in the Marketplace to find out why this is important.

5. Tech Dashboard

It’s back to Koozai for the final dashboard – a must for all those tech-heads out there. The widgets on this dashboard cover:

• operating system
• browser
• Java usage
• screen resolution
• Flash version
• mobile metrics ( lots of them)
• conversions

OK, so it’s a bit nerdy, but you’d be surprised what a difference understanding these metrics will make when deciding how to optimize your site. Grab it here.

Even More Analytics Dashboards

Those are the top picks, but there are dashboards to look at almost every aspect of your data. Here are some more places to get the ones you need:

• Portent says it has The Perfect Google Analytics Dashboard to give you a snapshot of business health over time so you know what to look at in more detail. It’s also worth checking out the site’s analytics category.
• SEOBooks shows how you can use similar data to that in the dashboards to create custom reports: Maximizing Google Analytics Insight for SEO with Custom Reports.
• Blue Riot Labs provides three dashboards and an email report looking at SEO, searches, top content and comparing time periods.
• Avinash Kaushik, recently featured in our list of must-read analytics blogs, has some awesome custom web analytics reports.

Share your favorite analytics dashboards in the comments.

11 COMMENTS

Sharon Hurley Hall
I’ll certainly check that out, Jill. I’m always happy to find new ways to look at the GA data.
March 12, 2013 Reply

Sharon Hurley Hall
It’s great, isn’t it, Amanda? My only problem is that I want to try them all! Dashboard Junkie has lots of them – I’m not telling how many I’ve added to my GA account!
March 12, 2013 Reply

Sharon Hurley Hall
Hope these work well for you, Tin.
March 13, 2013 Reply

Sharon Hurley Hall
I downloaded quite a few myself, Patrick. My strategy is to check them every so often and gradually delete the ones that I skim over. That still leaves about a dozen that are extremely useful.
April 24, 2013 Reply