The 4 best Google Analytics dashboards you need to be using

John Morton

  | Published on  

May 26, 2021

Just the name Google Analytics conjures all sorts of feelings for many a marketer.

Let's face it, not all of them are good.

Google Analytics is extremely powerful, but it's also quite technical and poses a challenge to even the most seasoned marketer.

Google Analytics is one of the most important tools in a content marketer’s toolbox. Among its many advantages is that it is free and provides an extensive amount of data about how your website is performing across certain metrics.

All is not lost! You can still be a Google Analytics pro for your team and watch your traffic soar. If you are not yet using Google Analytics you can learn how to create a free account and set it up with your website with our full Google Analytics intro guide.

In order to avoid feeling overwhelmed, Google Analytics provides users with the ability to create their own dashboards that show you the metrics you care the most about.

While creating a custom dashboard is complex and is best suited for those experienced with Google Analytics, there are pre-made dashboards that provides some of the most important metrics you need to care about as a content marketer.

In this article we will highlight a few of the best Google Analytics dashboards as well as the metrics they show you.

We will also link to these dashboards so you can check them out for yourself and even add them to your website if you like them. Luckily, Google Analytics allows you to have up to 20 dashboards with 12 widgets in each for each view / property in your Google Analytics account.

Pretty sweet right?

With that being said, let’s look at some of the best Google Analytics dashboards for beginners.

General Google Analytics Dashboard

Let's ease into this with an all purpose dashboard to show you your website's traffic at a glance.

Starting with the basics, some of the most popular General Analytics dashboards provide you with insights into unique visitors, where your visitors come from (SEO, social media, etc.), how people find your website, top keywords, top viewed pages, social networks that send the most traffic and referral websites.

These metrics provide the basics for any content marketer as they show you the “nuts and bolts” of how your website is performing.

Knowing these metrics will provide you with insights on how you can improve your SEO, keyword and social media skills.

You can download this general analytics dashboard and start reporting on your site's growth in seconds.

SEODashboards

Now thatyou have added a general analytic dashboard to your website, you will want toknow more specific about the various data points found in a general analyticdashboard.

One of the most important is to add an SEO dashboard to your Google Analytics account. Your SEO strategy can be enhanced by examining the data found in this kind of dashboard. This dashboard tracks which landing pages bring in visitors, what keywords bring the most visitors to your website, what are your most popular pages in organic search and which landing pages have the highest bounce rates.

You can download a helpful SEO dashboard to start reporting on your organic traffic now.

ContentMarketing Dashboards

One of themost helpful qualities of Google Analytics is its ability to provide you withmetrics that show not only the quantity of visitors to your site but the qualityof those visits as well.

Adding acontent marketing or content analysis dashboard to your Google Analyticsaccount provides you with insights on your content’s efficiency. Dashboards inthis area show you which pages of your site gets the most views, which pagesdrive the most conversions and which pages have the highest bounce rate.

This last metricprovides insights into your content that causes people to “bounce” off yoursite without exploring the rest of your content. It is especially helpful toknow which pages you will need to update on your website.

Finally, another metric a content marketing dashboard monitors in this area is which pages visitors look at with the most frequency upon entering or leaving your website.

Download this helpful content marketing dashboard to see which of your pages is performing the best.

SocialMedia Dashboards

The lastdashboard we will discuss in this article is social media dashboards. Whilesocial media sites often provide their own analytical software, GoogleAnalytics offers some metrics that monitor your social media accounts as well.

Existing dashboards that track social media metrics allow you to see which social channels bring quality traffic to your website (meaning traffic that does not bounce) as well as what percentage of your traffic comes from social media. Finally, you can learn which mobile devices get to your website from social media.

You can download this helpful social media dashboard to see how much traffic you are getting from social media now.

GoingForward

There are obviously many more dashboards out there, but these four give you an excellent head start to reporting on your site's traffic like a pro.

However, accessing all these metrics can be challenging for newcomers to the platform. Hopefully these dashboards provide a helpful starting point for looking at how well your website is helping you meet your goals.

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