A Simpler Way to Understand Your Google Analytics

Installing Custom Dashboards in Your Google Analytics

We all use (or should be using) Google Analytics (GA) to track the traffic to our sites, but since Google changed the information they give us, it can be challenging to get really good information on the who/what/when/wheres of our sites. When it comes to GA, there is so much information hidden in there—you could really spend hours and hours clicking around. But a lot of people are intimidated by GA and are even afraid that they'll break something if they click too much.

So how do you get the information that is most useful to you?

That's where dashboards come in. The dashboard portion of GA is pretty cool if you know how to create custom dashboards. But what if you don't? That is where our friends at econsultancy.com come in to save the day. They have a list of 10 custom GA dashboards that you can use to figure out who's coming to your site, from where, and what device they're using. In a nutshell—it's blogger geek heaven!!!

They give you 10 different dashboard templates that collect data on your visitors which range from basic site visits to more robust ones like e-commerce, real-time, and social media. Installing these dashboards is as easy as clicking a link and choosing which site you want them to be on (if you have more than one site, that is). The ones that I thought would be the most beneficial to me (on my personal blog and this one) were the blogging dashboard and the social media dashboard. If you run an e-commerce site, there are a couple of specific ones that would benefit you.

For this post, I took screenshots of my personal blog to share with you. Here are screenshots of each of the reports:

First up is the Social Media Dashboard:

Now the Blogging Dashboard:

There were a lot of things that I found interesting, such as, no matter how much some may disagree, Facebook is my #1 social media traffic source followed by Twitter and then Pinterest. My takeaway here is that I should probably do more posts that are good for pinning. I was a little shocked to see that BlogHer actually DID bring traffic to my site—not a ton, but more than I thought. I liked the “which kind of people link to you” report, but check out the bounce rate for referring sites such as Pinterest and Facebook. While those sites brought me good traffic, it wasn't traffic that stuck around. On the other hand, sites that are geared towards bloggers had the stickiest factor. I love how the post that I did when Adrienne and I auditioned for Amazing Race last year is still a big pull.

All of this information is available within your normal analytics dashboard, but it is REALLY nice to have it all in one place. Note: You CAN customize these reports even further. I imagine that one day I will pluck the pieces from each of these two reports and create one dashboard just for ease and convenience.

I highly recommend that you add these to your GA account and spend some time checking out how your blog is doing. (I'd love to take full credit for this discovery, but I have to give a shout-out to Matt who originally found the information!)