Digital Marketing Social Media 

How to Create a Simple Analytics Dashboard – Part 1

Chris Stocker

Whether you are just a small time blogger or a large company, you should have some sort of basic analytics monthly reporting. This is a two part post for creating a simple analytics dashboard on a monthly basis.  Part one is going to cover your overall traffic and then a break down of your organic search, direct traffic and referrals.  Part two is going to show you how to pull keyword level analytics, referrers and page level data and what the importance of this is.  This is a step-by-step guide for you to use.  Once again, this is a very basic report to at least provide you the data you need.

Part One – Overall Monthly Traffic

  1. Log into Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics/
  2. Select the account
  3. On the front page you can grab the overall site analytics.
  4. Create an Excel sheet that users the labels on the left side of the following instructions (See screen shot as an example). Fill in the following fields in the Excel file:
    1. Total Site Traffic => Visits
    2. Total Page Views => Pageviews
    3. Page Views per Visit => Pages/Visit
    4. Unique Visitors => Unique Visitors
    5. Returning Visitors => Pie graph shows returning visits
  5. Next Section of the Report is organic traffic data
  6. In order to get this data, on the left hand side click:
    1. Traffic Sources => Sources => Search => organic
  7. Fill in the following fields in the Excel file:
    1. Visits => Visits (located under line graph)
    2. Avg Time on Site => Avg. Visit Duration (located under line graph)
    3. % of New Visits => % New Visits (located under line graph)
    4. Total # of Keywords => Under list of keywords, there will be a  number that shows the total amount of keywords, this is the number you are interested in.
    5. # of branded keywords => Follow the next steps to grab this information:
      1. In the search bar above the list of keywords type in the company name (this is how branded is defined) For example, for you, it would be <insert company name>
    6. # of Non-branded Keywords => Difference between Total-branded
    7. # of Pages Viewed => Follow the next steps:
      1. On the left hand side, click Content => Site Content => All Pages
      2. Then Click on “Secondary Dimension”
      3. Under the line graph, click on Traffic Sources => Click on “Medium”
      4. Next to the search bar, click on “Advanced”
      5. The Advanced Filter should read “Include-Medium-Containing-organic”
        1. You must type in the word “organic”
      6. Click Apply
      7. The total # of organic pages will be in the lower right hand corner.  This is the number that you are looking for in the # of pages viewed under organic in the Excel sheet.
  8. Direct Traffic visits can be found by click on the left hand side:
    1. Sources => Direct
    2. Visits under line graph is the number that you are looking for.
  9. Referral traffic visits can be found by click on the left hand side:
    1. Sources => Referrals
    2. Visits under line graph is the number you are looking for

If you would like more help with creating monthly analytics dashboards or more in depth analysis of these reports contact us today about our analytics consulting services.