Impotant of Google Analytic

Google Analytic is the most popular web analytic software on the planet. You probably use it.

But I bet you're not using it very well. (Sorry.)

The key weakness of Analytic is the same as its key strength: there's so much data and so many reports. You can pull a ton of different metrics from it, but there's so much there that it can be hard to pick through the noise to draw useful insights. If you know how to use it right, though, Analytics can be one of the most important tools in your marketing arsenal.

For example, did you know that you can set up a custom dashboard of the metrics that matter most for your business, to make it easy to see almost all your key performance data in one place each time you want to?

Rather than bouncing around between a million different reports, you can just open your dashboard and see everything at once.

Creating a custom dashboard is easy.

First, hit "Dashboards" at the top-left of your Analytic account.

You'll see under "Private" that there's already a default dashboard that's been created for you, called "My Dashboard."

We're going to use that as the basis for our custom dashboard, but another option would be to hit "New Dashboard" if you wanted to start with a clean slate. (Some advanced users use multiple dashboards for different purposes.)

Click "My Dashboard" and check out what's already laid out for you.

Each tile you see on the right is called a "widget." Widgets are the basic building block of a dashboard, and you can add and remove them as you see fit. You can also click the blue title of the widget (e.g. "New Users") to see the full report that's feeding it.

Note that you can change the time-frame as well, using the box at the upper-right of your dashboard (like any Analytics report). You can also add comparison periods, which are key for measuring week-over-week or month-over-month changes.

By default, your "My Dashboard" dashboard includes the following widgets, some of which are more useful than others (note: if you're already familiar with all the default widgets, skip ahead to the 5 new widgets I recommend adding):

New Users: The number of users whose session was marked as a first-time session.

Users: The total number of users for the requested time period.

Sessions (by location): The number of sessions (basically visits) to your site from users in each country. Mouse over a country to see the precise number from a given country.

Sessions by Browser: The number of sessions (basically visits) via each of the top browsers for your site.

This widget can be useful for prioritizing which browsers you should be optimizing for.

Avg. Session Duration and Pages/Session: Avg. Session Duration: the average length of time a user spends on your site in a single visit before leaving or timing out. Pages / Session: the average number of pages a user visits during a single visit to your site.

This widget can be useful for seeing how engaged your users are with your content.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

Generally, a high bounce rate means people don't like what they see on your landing page(s) and leave right away because of it. But depending on how your tracking is set up, it can also mean that your landing pages simply do a good job of answering their questions or converting them immediately (e.g. if your landing page has a one-step opt-in form).

Goal Completions: The total number of completed goals. (Requires you to have goals set up.)

Revenue: Total ecommerce revenue. (Requires you to have ecommerce revenue tracking or enhanced ecommerce revenue tracking set up, which you should definitely do [instructions here] if you sell anything on your site.)

Those default widgets have their place, but there's a lot of important missing information you can add via new widgets.

Go ahead and click "Add Widget" at the top of your dashboard and let's add some new ones.

5 New Widgets For Your Dashboard

1) Sessions and Revenue by Source / Medium. This widget shows you where most of your traffic is coming from, how much traffic is coming, and how well that traffic is turning into sales. (See below for alternate if you're not tracking revenue.)

To add this widget, click "Add Widget" and choose the options shown in the image below:

Save it and that will give you a nice table like this on your dashboard:

If you're not using ecommerce conversion tracking, the last column will show $0.00 like my screenshot -- in that case, use either Goal Completions or Goal Value instead of Revenue for the last column.

2) AdWords Performance. This widget will show you your AdWords ad spend vs. revenue over time. (If you don't use Google AdWords, skip this one.)

Choose these options in the "Add a Widget" box:

You'll get a nice snapshot graph like this:

And you can mouse over any individual day to see the details of that day's performance.

Like before, if you're not using ecommerce conversion tracking, instead of using Revenue as your second metric, you'll want to choose whatever metric best represents your desired final outcomes: usually Goal Completions or Goal Value.

(Note: if you're using AdWords but don't see any cost data in Analytics, you'll just need to link the two together to get the data to flow through.)

3) Social Sessions and Pages per Session. This widget will show you how many visits you're getting from your top social traffic sources, as well as how engaged with your brand those users are.

Remember that social is primarily best for building awareness and interest, so our main goal for it is engagement rather than direct conversions -- so that's what we're monitoring with this widget.

Choose these options:

To get this table:

4) Top Content Pageviews and Bounce Rate. This widget shows which pages on your site are most popular, along with what their bounce rates are. It's a great way to quickly see how effective specific content on your site is, especially if you blog or do other content marketing.

Choose these options:

To get this table:

5) Single Metrics. This last widget I'll show you is the simplest type: the single metric. In this case we'll be adding one for Revenue, but you can add any metric you want.

Choose these options:

To get this widget:

You can repeat this last process to get single-metric widgets for Goal Completions, Goal (or Ecommerce) Conversion Rate, Abandonment Rate, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Average Order Value, or any other single metrics you'd like to see at a glance.

Single-metric widgets are especially useful when you use the "Compare to" function in the date-range box at the top right of your dashboard to see changes over time.

Conclusion

Not all of these widgets will apply to everyone.

But most of them will apply to most businesses, and you can completely customize your own dashboard depending on your own specific needs.

That way, you can spend less time digging through a hundred different reports -- and more time acting on the data to get better results.