Whether you are managing one website or hundreds for yourself or your clients, one thing is for certain. There are a lot of analytics out there that you must review to ensure that your online marketing strategies are working. But the last thing any busy professional wants to do is log in from one tool to the next to see the data they need. Fortunately, a dashboard is the answer. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can create an effective analytics dashboard that will cut down the time you spend getting to your analytics, giving you more time to actually review your data.
Essential Google Analytics Widgets
While Cyfe also has widgets for analytics from Chartbeat, GoSquared, and Mixpanel, we’re going to start with Google Analytics since it’s the top choice in free web analytics tools. There are over 100 Google Analytics widgets to choose from covering metrics for your AdWords, apps, audience, content, conversions, commerce, and traffic sources. Think about the areas in Google Analytics you visit the most. For example, your audience overview…
Top traffic sources…
Real time visitors…
Top landing pages…
And, of course, your conversions.
As you can see, getting your favorite pieces of Google Analytics data for one website in one quick dashboard at a glance can be valuable in and of itself.
You can also create a dashboard that looks at important data from all of your websites at one glance.
Now, let’s look beyond Google Analytics to other data you’ll want to keep track of for your websites.
Essential Google Webmaster Tools Widgets
Serious web masters who want their websites to perform well in Google use Google Webmaster Tools, and for good reason. This is where you can get a peek into what Google thinks of your website. The overview widget will show you if you have unread messages, crawl errors, and the number of pages indexed from your site map along with the top internal and external keywords for your website.
You can also have a widget to preview the messages inside your GWT account.
And you can get a quick glance at the URLs on your website that are resulting in crawl errors.
Put these widgets together for one or more websites in your analytics dashboard, and now you’ve brought two powerful Google tools into one place. But let’s not stop there…
More Essential Web Analytics Widgets
Want to know what other analytics tools think about your website? Why not add an Alexa widget to keep track of your traffic rank…
A Quantcast widget to keep track of their assessment of your daily visitors…
And a Pingdom widget to keep track of your website’s downtime (monitor one website with a free account).
Add these widgets for one or more websites into your dashboard for the ultimate overview of all of your website’s important analytics data.
Even More Analytics Widgets
If those weren’t enough for you, you can even start to mix in analytics from beyond your website. For example, you could line up your web analytics data next to widgets for the following.
- Google AdSense earnings, pageviews, clicks, CTR, CPC, and RPM.
- Google AdWords cost, impressions, clicks, and conversions.
- Emails sent, bounces, unsubscribes, opens, and clicks from Aweber, Constant Contact, MailChimp, GetResponse, and other mailing list services.
- Google Alerts for mentions of your website or business.
- Moz back links, external links, mozRank, domain authority, and page authority.
- Daily keyword rankings in SERPs.
- Analytics from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- Open support tickets from Zendesk.
The possibilities to monitor one or more websites are endless!
As you can see, 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 information to help your website and business grow and move forward. To create your own web analytics dashboard, be sure to sign up for Cyfe today!