It’s easy to get lost in the sea of data that is thrown your way.
You may be asking yourself: “How can I make sense of all this?” The answer is simple; build an analytics dashboard!
An analytics dashboard will help you track and measure what matters most. So you can make better-informed decisions for your business.
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to create a dashboard with Elementary Analytics.
We’ll also cover some tips on how to best interpret data from these tools so it makes sense for your business needs.
With a little time invested today, you could have the key information needed to run a successful operation tomorrow!
By reviewing key performance indicators (KPIs) for your digital platforms (website, social media account, ad campaigns).
You can track that what you are investing time and money in, actually helps you grow your business.
What Analytics Are Important For Your Business
This can be a tough question, and there is no one-size-fits-all here.
It all depends on what your business is to work out what to track.
An eCommerce business will more than likely track sales from its website.
If you are a publisher, blogger, or create a lot of content. Your goal could be to increase website traffic.
Software businesses now track how many new subscribers they are getting.
If you a local business then it may be enquiries or appointments that you are tracking.
Working out what to track is key for you to develop your digital marketing strategy.
As well as being able to see if any strategies you have in place are working or not.
Why You Need An Analytics Dashboard To Track KPIs
It doesn’t matter if you working in marketing for a company. And are responsible for reporting marketing performance to executives or customers.
You need an easy way to track data, that you can access at any point to give updates to people you work with or for.
The same applies if you own the business. You want to be able to ask someone to get the data or get it yourself at any given time.
Having a dashboard that does this for you can solve a lot of problems.
How long does it take you to get all the data you need from Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Not to mention the ad platforms or business managers.
Why not have a dashboard that anyone can access when they want? That shows all the information they could need.
Next, I will show you how simple it is to create a dashboard. Which will cut down the time you spend getting to your analytics. Giving you more time to actually review your data.
Start With Google Analytics
Your website is the most important digital asset you have, bar none.
Everything you want to achieve online will be on your website.
People who build their stores or businesses on Facebook or Amazon. Are laying the foundations in quicksand.
These platforms can sink you with the click of their fingers.
That’s my rant.
Your website is key when creating your dashboard. Start by using Google Analytics as your “single point of truth”.
You can then follow this up with Google Search Console information.
Google Analytics Dashboard
There are a million and one ways to track website analytics. Yes, Google Analytics may be cumbersome and difficult to navigate.
It’s still the best way to track website analytics.
Here at Elementary Analytics. We have designed some dashboards that will help you make sense of your Google Analytics data.
Once you integrate a website into Elementary Analytics you can quickly see a number of dashboards to help you make sense of things.
Once integrated. The home screen of your Elementary Analytics account will show you the 4 key metrics for your site, for the last 30 days.
As well as allowing you to link other analytics data from different platforms to your website stats.
We also have a screen that lets you see just Google Analytics information for multiple websites on a single screen.
Each “widget”, again, shows you the key metrics. Also showing you a graph of your website’s performance, day by day, for the last 30 days.
Being able to see performance across multiple domains is a game-changer for digital marketing agencies, multiple business owners, and larger holding companies.
Since visualizing cross-domain tracking can be difficult via Google Analytics, you can use Elementary Analytics to bring those multiple website views together.
You can also drill a little deeper into the stats of a website. Click the ‘View more detail’ button and it will take you to the breakdown screen.
This screen is a little different as we show you the daily stats for the last 7 days. You can change this view to show daily analytics for the last 14, 30, and 90 days.
We also rounded up the data for four different periods. Helping you give a snapshot of how the few months have been performing.
Next week show performance, month on month for the last 12 months.
This helps you and your business see how things have been progressing and if you are regularly hitting the website KPIs or not.
Last, certainly not least. We give you the view information for your top 10 landing pages and exit pages for the last 30 days.
This helps you see what is working well for you, so you can double down. Also shows you where people may be leaving your website.
This could be key. For example, if you run an eCommerce store and your checkout page is in the exit page list, there could be something wrong with the checkout itself. Or the journey the customer goes on before hitting the checkout page.
Now, let’s look beyond Google Analytics to other data you’ll want to keep track of for your websites.
Google Search Console Analytics
As I was writing this post, I wanted to check how many searches there are on Google alone each day.
It blew my tiny little mind. There are 5.6 billion searches on Google per day. Let me say that again 5.6 billion searches on Google per day.
THAT’S INSANE.
Anyone that is serious about their website, and wants people to find you through a Google search. You need to be tracking your Google Search Analytics.
Google Search Console Dashboard
Unlike Google Analytics, which has well over 200 data points you can look at. Google Search Console Analytics only has a handful, which is awesome.
The problem is it can be hard to tie this back to your Google Analytics stats.
This is where Elementary Analytics can help you.
From the home screen of your account. Once you have added a Google Analytics website. You will see a button saying “Add Google Search Console”.
This will allow you to link any domain from your Google Search Console account to the website.
Once linked together. you can not only see your Google Analytics data on the home screen. But also you Google Search Console Analytics.
With Elementary Analytics. Once you have started to link different platforms together. We have a pre-built screen that will show you how your analytics may correlate.
We do this by “stacking” data from all the platforms you have linked together. Starting with Google Analytics, then displaying Google Search Console data underneath to show performance trends.
One of the frustrations I always had with looking at my marketing analytics, was each platform displayed it to you in different ways.
I even found it difficult to switch between websites in Google Analytics. Elementary Analytics solves these problems. Helping you to focus on making sense of the data, instead of wasting time trying to pull from different platforms.
As with our Google Analytics view. You can see an overview for multiple Google Search Console records if needed.
Again, we present the Google Search Console analytics in a consistent way, allowing you to change time periods. View collated analytics from the last 90 days and give you a 12-month run rate.
What’s different between our Google Analytics dashboard and Google Search Console dashboard? Is on the “Top 10” list.
With your Google Search Console Analytics. We show you the top 10 pages that have appeared in searches for the last 30 days. As well as showing you what search queries people are using to find your data.
This helps you to review those pages, to make sure they are helping towards the goals for your website. As well as giving insights into what search terms people are using.
It can be a surprise how people come across your website. Google can rank your sites for terms now didn’t even think about.
Even More Analytics Widgets
If those weren’t enough for you, you can even start to mix in analytics from beyond your website.
Elementary Analytics supports widgets for the biggest social media and marketing platforms.
Allowing you to link analytics from your Facebook and LinkedIn Pages, or Instagram business account.
We even pull data from Google and Facebook Ads platforms, allowing you to create a widget that gives you a complete overview of your marketing analytics and stats.
Does your business have multiple websites? With Elementary Analytics you can build as many widgets and dashboards as you need to monitor the stats to help you grow your business.
Get started building your own web analytics dashboard
As you can see, web analytics dashboards can help you cut down the mindless time spent logging into, navigating around, and browsing your web analytics data.
This way, you can spend more time getting valuable insights to inform your digital marketing efforts, help your business grow, and move forward.
If you’d like to know more about web analytics. And how they fit into an overall data strategy. I go into more detail in this article: What Is Marketing Analytics and Data?
Want to create a data dashboard for your business?
With Elementary Analytics, you can connect all your key business analytics and build dashboards in minutes.
