Pick up Speed with a Custom Dashboard

Thanks to reams of new, whizzy online data, many creatively-bent marketers and advertisers are losing speed in by becoming buried under reports.

Personally, I don’t think Google does a great job in making it easy for customers to figure out what they really need to know when it comes to marketing analytics.   But, they DO do a great job in collecting REAMS of data for you to look at.  Most people, even if they have an analytics account set up, just don’t know how to dig out the information they need.  Between CTRs, Clicks, Bounce rates and other data, how is a person to know what is important, and what isn’t?

At Tenato, we have recently added handy new service:  building you a CUSTOMIZED Google Dashboard.   That way, you can look at only the numbers you most need, and ensure you stay on top of your marketing program.  Here are some of the metrics that are likely quite important — ones that can easily be positioned into your custom dashboard:

1. Visits by Source/Medium — How about a nice pie chart showing how much of your traffic is coming from people doing generic searches (for example “sign shops in calgary”) versus directly entering your address (www.yoursignshop.com) in the search bar, or online ads you might be running online.  A breakdown of where the traffic is coming from is really useful to show what is driving people toward you.
2. Unique Visitors – How many different people actually visit your site?  You should know whether this is growing or shrinking — because this ultimately is going to dramatically affect your market share.
3. Your Best Content – What pages are your most popular?  This will tell you which ones you should focus your most attention on, and what your customers are demanding.
4. Visitor Patterns – When do most people visit — what days of the week? What times?  That way, if you’re doing any social media or blogging, you can time your release of the content out to when people will most likely be paying attention.
5. Keyword Search Phrases – What key search phrases are people using to find your site, and how much of your new “walk-in” online traffic is coming from these search phrases?   This will help you learn what phrases you should use to focus your content.

In the end, does watching analytics help?   I can tell you that while I used to look at Analytics once a month or less, I am now looking at them almost every day — it makes me pay attention to how good the content we’re developing actually is.    If all marketers really paid attention to the results they are creating by their efforts, marketing efforts would be infinitely more efficient.

Please give us a call if you’d like us to build you a custom Google Analytics dashboard.  It only takes a few hours, and it will definitely put you at the steering wheel of your marketing program.