Google Analytics is a powerful website tracking tool. Once activated, it analyses your website’s traffic and gives you detailed data on what your users are interested in and how they move across your website. For many SMB, Google gathers so many data that they don’t know where to start looking into or what each data set means. The digital marketing team at relación wants to make it easier for you to cut through and actually understand what you’re looking at. We developed two simple dashboards for your Google Analytics account, which you can simply import and then interpret regularly.
How to get the relación dashboards for Google Analytics
First, log into your Google Analytics account and go to the “Customization” tab on the left side. Here you can click on “Dashboards” and click the red “Create” button to add a new dashboard. Now you have the choice to start with a starter dashboard, a blank dashboard or – look further down – “Import from Gallery”. Click the “Import from Gallery” button. In the new window that pops up, you can search in the top left corner for relación (don’t forget to press Enter). You’ll be presented with our “Website Traffic Dashboard” and our “Traffic Sources, Mobile & Engagement Dashboard”. By clicking on the import button below the first one, this dashboard is copied into your account. To add the second dashboard, too, simply repeat the process and at the last step, select the other dashboard.
Once both dashboards are added to your Google Analytics, you’ll find them under “Customization” > “Dashboards”, where you can open them individually and set the reporting dates on the top right corner. If you set them i.e. from the 1st till the last of the month and click on the small “Email” button under the dashboard name, you can schedule the dashboards to arrive to your email automatically. There you can also select with which frequency you want to receive the reports.
Which Google Analytics metrics are most important for my SMB?
We tried making the dashboards as simple and easy to understand as possible. Take your time to have a good look through. We can also provide you with a detailed interpretation guide for each value, just drop us a line. Here, we’ll give you a short version:
Website Visits (Website Traffic Dashboard)
If you’re not doing any kind of digital marketing whatsoever, it’s very likely your page views are staying at a low level. If you have started online marketing, such as SEO campaigns, email marketing or content marketing, your visitor numbers should increase continuously. In case your numbers suddenly start going down, something is not right – maybe your website is broken or having SEO issues that cause Google to lower its index in the search rankings. Keep an eye on your visitor numbers and react if they start to go down or you want to improve them.
Pages Popularity (Website Traffic Dashboard)
This metric gives you a good idea which pages your website users visit most. They may come because these pages are well-indexed in Google, or because it’s the most important issue for them. The pages popularity should reflect the importance of the pages: It’s great if your contact page is listed very high in the list (as this is usually the goal, to get people to contact you) – but it’s not so useful if your privacy policy is the most viewed page of your website. If you want to push the popularity of certain pages and get more users onto them, you should start with SEO.
Traffic by Day of the Week (Website Traffic Dashboard)
To get a better idea when your users are active, have a look at these numbers. If you have a regular business page, it’s very likely most of your website traffic happens during the week. For every other kind of business, i.e. restaurants, the strongest days may be at the weekend. You can compare the numbers of your website traffic per day with the actual customers that show up / get in touch on each of these days. Is there a pattern? You can also use this information for scheduling marketing campaigns just on the weekdays that you need more traction, i.e. if Thursday is your weakest day, you can start a Google Ads campaign only on Thursdays to spend little budget but get a good impact just when you need it.
Most Engaging Traffic Sources (Traffic Sources, Engagement & Mobile Dashboard)
This gives you more information where your users actually come from. You may find external pages that link to you and drive lots of interested users to you. With the Pages / Session indicator, you see how many pages each user on average looked at in your sessions – the more they’ve seen, the more they are engaged. If you have to make a decision between two marketing channels, i.e. Facebook or Instagram, you can use this metric to determine where to best invest your marketing budget.
Visits by Device (Traffic Sources, Engagement & Mobile Dashboard)
A very important metric nowadays is the device metric. Here you can see, which device your users actually use the most to browse your website. In the past 3 years, we have seen a rapid and strong change from desktop to mobile being the dominant device. Some of our clients have up to 70% mobile traffic, showing clearly that a well-working, user-experience optimised and responsive website is not a luxury anymore, but a necessity. Did we mention already that the relación team are experts in digital marketing and website development? 😉
