My Favorite 5 Analytics Dashboards - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Sixthman

Finding effective ways of organizing your analytics dashboards is quite a bit easier if you can get a sense for what has worked for others. To that end, in today's Whiteboard Friday the founder of Sixth Man Marketing, Ed Reese, shares his five favorite approaches.

UPDATE: At the request of several commenters, Ed has generously provided GA templates for these dashboards. Check out the links in his comment below!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Hi, I'm Ed Reese with Sixth Man Marketing and Local U. Welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to talk about one of my favorite things in terms of Google Analytics -- the dashboard.

So think of your dashboard like the dashboard on your car -- what's important to you and what's important to your client. I have the new Tesla dashboard, you might recognize it. So, for my Tesla dashboard, I want navigation, tunes, calendar, everything and a bag of chips. You notice my hands are not on the wheel because it drives itself now. Awesome.

So, what's important? I have the top five dashboards that I like to share with my clients and create for them. These are the executive dashboards -- one for the CMO on the marketing side, new markets, content, and a tech check. You can actually create dashboards and make sure that everything is working.

These on the side are some of the few that I think people don't take a look at as often. It's my opinion that we have a lot of very generic dashboards, so I like to really dive in and see what we can learn so that your client can really start using them for their advantage.

#1 - Executives

Let's start with the executive dashboard. There is a lot of debate on whether or not to go from left to right or right to left. So in terms of outcome, behavior, and acquisition, Google Analytics gives you those areas. They don't mark them as these three categories, but I follow Avinash's language and the language that GA uses.

When you're talking to executives or CFOs, it's my personal opinion that executives always want to see the money first. So focus on financials, conversion rates, number of sales, number of leads. They don't want to go through the marketing first and then get to the numbers. Just give them what they want. On a dashboard, they're seeing that first.

So let's start with the result and then go back to behavior. Now, this is where a lot of people have very generic metrics -- pages viewed, generic bounce rate, very broad metrics. To really dive in, I like focusing and using the filters to go to specific areas on the site. So if it's a destination like a hotel, "Oh, are they viewing the pages that helped them get there? Are they looking at the directional information? Are they viewing discounts and sorts of packages?" Think of the behavior on those types of pages you want to measure, and then reverse engineer. That way you can tell they executive, "Hey, this hotel reservation viewed these packages, which came from these sources, campaigns, search, and social." Remember, you're building it so that they can view it for themselves and really take advantage and see, "Oh, that's working, and this campaign from this source had these behaviors that generated a reservation," in that example.

#2 - CMO

Now, let's look at it from a marketing perspective. You want to help make them look awesome. So I like to reverse it and start with the marketing side in terms of acquisition, then go to behavior on the website, and then end up with the same financials -- money, conversion rate percentages, number of leads, number of hotel rooms booked, etc. I like to get really, really focused.

So when you're building a dashboard for a CMO or anyone on the marketing side, talk to them about what metrics matter. What do they really want to learn? A lot of times you need to know their exact territory and really fine tune it in to figure out exactly what they want to find out.

Again, I'm a huge fan of filters. What behavior matters? So for example, one of our clients is Beardbrand. They sell beard oil and they support the Urban Beardsman. We know that their main markets are New York, Texas, California, and the Pacific Northwest. So we could have a very broad regional focus for acquisition, but we don't. We know where their audience lives, we know what type of behavior they like, and ultimately what type of behavior on the website influences purchases.

So really think from a marketing perspective, "How do we want to measure the acquisition to the behavior on the website and ultimately what does that create?"

These are pretty common, so I think most people are using a marketing and executive dashboard. Here are some that have really made a huge difference for clients of ours.

#3 - New markets

Love new market dashboards. Let's say, for example, you're a hotel chain and you normally have people visiting your site from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Well, what happened in our case, we had that excluded, and we were looking at states broader -- Hawaii, Alaska, Colorado, Texas. Not normally people who would come to this particular hotel.

Well, we discovered in the dashboard -- and it was actually the client that discovered it -- that we suddenly had a 6000% increase in Hawaii. They called me and said, "Are we marketing to Hawaii?" I said no. They said, "Well, according to the dashboard, we've had 193 room nights in the past 2 months." Like, "Wow, 193 room nights from Hawaii, what happened?" So we started reverse engineering that, and we found out that Allegiant Airlines suddenly had a direct flight from Honolulu to Spokane, and the hotel in this case was two miles from the hotel. They could then do paid search campaigns in Hawaii. They can try to connect with Allegiant to co-op some advertising and some messaging. Boom. Would never have been discovered without that dashboard.

#4 - Top content

Another example, top content. Again, going back to Beardbrand, they have a site called the Urban Beardsman, and they publish a lot of content for help and videos and tutorials. To measure that content, it's really important, because they're putting a lot of work into educating their market and new people who are growing beards and using their product. They want to know, "Is it worth it?" They're hiring photographers, they're hiring writers, and we're able to see if people are reading the content they're providing, and then ultimately, we're focusing much more on their content on the behavior side and then figuring out what that outcome is.

A lot of people have content or viewing of the blog as part of an overall dashboard, let's say for your CMO. I'm a big fan of, in addition to having that ,also having a very specific content dashboard so you can see your top blogs. Whatever content you provide, I want you to always know what that's driving on your website.

#5 - Tech check

One of the things that I've never heard anyone talk about before, that we use all the time, is a tech check. So we want to see a setup so we can view mobile, tablet, desktop, browsers. What are your gaps? Where is your site possibly not being used to its fullest potential? Are there any issues with shopping carts? Where do they fall off on your website? Set up any possible tech that you can track. I'm a big fan of looking both on the mobile, tablet, any type of desktop, browsers especially to see where they're falling off. For a lot of our clients, we'll have two, three, or four different tech dashboards. Get them to the technical person on the client side so they can immediately see if there's an issue. If they've updated the website, but maybe they forgot to update a certain portion of it, they've got a technical issue, and the dashboard can help detect that.

So these are just a few. I'm a huge fan of dashboards. They're very powerful. But the big key is to make sure that not only you, but your client understands how to use them, and they use them on a regular basis.

I hope that's been very helpful. Again, I'm Ed Reese, and these are my top five dashboards. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!