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Stefana Zaric on August 27, 2022 (last modified on April 12, 2023) • 18 minute read
Does using Google Analytics seem like mission impossible to you?
You’re not alone—89% of marketers say they want to improve their knowledge of Google Analytics, so we know it’s not easy. With so little time available, digging into the available reports can be time-consuming and overwhelming.
But, Google Analytics offers access to more than 500 unique pieces of data. If you do a little digging, you will surely find gold—data you can turn into actionable insights and make your website more successful in driving traffic, engaging visitors, and converting them into leads or customers.
Out of the 200+ dashboard templates we offer at Databox for more than 70 tools, like HubSpot, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads, Google Analytics dashboards are by far the most popular.
We’re sharing the best ones in this article, along with tips on how to create your own dashboard and track relevant metrics to better understand your website performance.
Jump to the section you’re most interested in:
A Google Analytics dashboard is a collection of visualizations showing your website data in a well-organized and digestible format.
These visualizations display real-time data pulled automatically from your website through charts, tables, maps, scorecards, etc. They give you a quick overview of your KPIs and relevant metrics over a specific period so you can take appropriate action to improve your performance or seize a growth opportunity.
Related: Google Analytics Reporting: A Complete Guide to Reports, Metrics, Dimensions, and More
All you need to create your first Google Analytics Dashboard is a Google account and access to a Google Analytics property—a website you’d like to monitor. Then, follow these steps.
When you open the main Google Analytics page, click on Customization in the left sidebar.
From the drop-down menu, choose Dashboards.
Click Create from the menu that appears on the screen.
From the pop-up menu, choose Blank Canvas (to build a dashboard from scratch) or Starter Dashboard (to start with predefined metrics).
If you choose Blank Canvas, you will be able to name your dashboard. From there, you can start adding widgets (up to 12 timelines, maps, tables, pie charts, and other visualization types) with the desired metrics.
Name your widgets and choose metrics and dimensions to group them by.
Depending on what type of visualization you’ve chosen, you can customize it in the next step (for example, choose the number of slices in a pie chart).
In the next step, add any filters to help you narrow down the data.
Link the widget you’re creating to a URL or a report.
After you click on Save, your dashboard will be created.
As an individual user, you can create up to 20 private dashboards. The limit for shared dashboards per Google Analytics account is 50.
Related: 19 Google Analytics Custom Dimensions for Drilling Down Into Your Website’s Performance
If you already have a data dashboard and want to access it, here’s how to do it:
When you want to share your dashboard with the team, manager, or clients, do the following:
Be careful before you click to share your dashboard. The only way to unshare it is to delete it.
Related: How to Share Custom Reports, Dashboards, and Template Links in Google Analytics with Others
Yes, you can DIY in Google Analytics, but what if you would prefer a simpler, easier route? After all, once you learn how it’s done, you still have to choose the right metrics and design your dashboard to answer the important questions your stakeholders have, for example:
and more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of Google Analytics experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing all the most important website traffic KPIs. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
With this Google Analytics dashboard, you can quickly learn who is visiting your site and details such as:
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Google offers a place where Google Analytics experts can share their prebuilt dashboard templates with other marketers: the Solutions Gallery.
Below, you’ll find 10 of the most popular Google Analytics dashboards from the Solutions Gallery with explanations on how to read them and links to the templates so you can easily import them to your Google Analytics account.
GA Web Analytics Dashboard gives you an insight into your website visitors: how deep they dig into your pages, what sources they come from, where they’re located. Thanks to this data, you can identify your most fruitful traffic sources in terms of visitor quality.
How to read this Google Analytics dashboard?
Tracking the traffic from different sources, devices, and locations will help you determine where your marketing efforts are most effective. By analyzing the metrics on the web analytics dashboard, you’ll answer the following questions:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Traffic Growth dashboard below to get a basic picture of your website’s performance and customize it to further match your needs by adding or removing metrics.
Related: 15 Tips for Setting Realistic Website Traffic Goals
Google Analytics Executive Dashboard provides you with the perfect layout for executive presentations, outlining the three most important categories of metrics available in GA: acquisition, behavior, and outcomes. This dashboard is ideal for showcasing your most important insights to executives who don’t have much time for details.
The metrics displayed here, such as the number of unique visitors, average time on site, and goal conversion rate, will help you answer these questions:
Want this dashboard in an Executive dashboard software like Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics VP Digital dashboard below to customize it by adding new metrics, colors, and widgets, and share it with members of your executive team.
Related: Executive Reporting: Management Reporting Best Practices & Report Examples
Digital Marketing Analytics Dashboard gives you all the key stats on the types of visitors that arrive on your site. By focusing on demographics, devices, and locations, you get a full picture of your visitor’s context for learning about your product.
By tracking metrics number of new and returning users, pages per session, or session by location, you will answer these questions:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Audience Overview dashboard below to get actionable information about people who visit your website and customize the report by adding the metrics that matter to you the most.
Content Marketing dashboard analyzes the efficiency of your content. It displays your best-performing pages in terms of views, goal conversions, number of exits, and more. By monitoring this dashboard, you can learn which topics resonate the most with your audience, which CTAs generate the best results, and which pages need improvement.
Track metrics like pageviews by page/country, sessions by landing page, and bounce rate by page title to answer some burning questions:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Content Analysis dashboard below to dive deep into your content’s performance. Don’t forget you can customize the dashboard by adding the metrics that matter to you and removing the ones you don’t need.
Related: Content Marketing Reporting: Best Practices and Tools for Building Great Reports (Free Ready to Use Templates Included)
SEO is a long-run game, which means you need to revisit your pages regularly to ensure they’re still driving traffic and attracting backlinks. This dashboard allows you to monitor your SEO efforts and learn how well your content is ranking and if it’s bringing quality visitors to your website organically.
By tracking metrics such as top keywords, top organic landing pages and organic clicks by page, you’ll be able to answer some of these questions:
One of the downsides of Google Analytics data is that many keywords show as “not provided.” To get better data, download this free Google Analytics SEO dashboard to combine Google Analytics and Google Search Console data in a single view.
Related: How Virayo Uses Databox to Build SEO Reports (& Custom Metrics) to Visualize ROI for Clients
Are your social media platforms contributing to your brand? This social media analytics dashboard allows you to track both on-site and off-site activities: visitors, engagement, your most shared content, etc. You can learn what platforms generate the most traffic for your website, where your high-quality visitors come from, and whether they convert.
Monitoring metrics like new visitor acquisition from social, traffic from social sources, and social source value will help you learn:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Social Media dashboard below to easily measure the actions users take after clicking through to your website from social media and redirect your efforts toward your most valuable source.
Related: 50+ Social Media Statistics That Will Take Your Marketing Campaign to the Next Level
To optimize your ecommerce marketing strategy, you need to learn about your customers’ purchasing habits, interests, and needs. The ecommerce analytics dashboard examines your website’s mobile users and those different referral sources. By looking at product revenue by product, it helps you understand where you need to offer more products, and much more.
Track metrics like revenue by device, revenue by source, and average order value to answer these questions:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Product Revenue dashboard below to easily track which channels and devices drive most of your purchases and see a streamlined overview of your most relevant metrics customized to your needs.
Related: 8 Essential Ecommerce Google Analytics Dashboards Recommended by Ecommerce Experts
If you want a complete picture of your site’s performance, this Site Performance Google Analytics Dashboard will give you all the necessary answers. It shows your site’s overall speed and helps you identify potential issues that have nothing to do with the quality of your content.
You can track metrics like average load times on both web and mobile or load times by browser to answer these questions:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Site Performance dashboard below to easily measure average load speeds for your site overall and by page, browser, country, and type of visitor (new versus returning).
Related: 12 Ways For Using UTM Parameters to Track Website, Content, & Campaign Performance
Creating an excellent user experience on mobile is a must, and needs constant monitoring so you can make sure all pages are mobile-friendly. Mobile Analytics dashboard tells you if there’s an area of improvement in terms of how your pages look on mobile devices and if they prompt users to take the desired action.
By monitoring metrics like keywords, sources, goal completions, and more, you can learn:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Responsive Design dashboard below to easily measure the user experience for each page of your site on mobile devices.
Related: A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Website Optimization
The Goals Dashboard provides you with detailed data on the visits that resulted in goal completions, which helps you optimize elements on your website for more goal competitions in the future. Find out which channels have the best goal completion rates, the ages and locations of visitors who completed goals, and what pages drove the most goal completions.
Monitor metrics such as goal completions by day, visits and goal completions by city, visits and goal completions by device to answer the following questions:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics (Conversion Report: Goals Overview) below to track goal completions and conversion rates on your website hassle-free.
Related: How to Improve Your Business Bottom Line By Setting Goals and Alerts in Databox
You’ve seen some examples of Google Analytics dashboards to help you track your website performance, but what if you need more data and tools to fill in the blanks and really understand how you’re doing?
Databox saves the day and makes Google Analytics reporting easy with our dashboard templates that integrate data from the most popular analytics tools like HubSpot, Shopify, Facebook, etc. We’re sharing six more examples of free Google Analytics dashboards you can grab and start using today.
Is your email marketing strategy effective? If you want to know whether your emails are contributing to your marketing goals, download this Email Marketing Analytics dashboard template and track metrics like sessions by email by date, landing page sessions from email, signups from emails, and more.
You’ll be able to answer questions like:
Browse more email marketing dashboards here.
Video marketing campaigns are a must nowadays, and you can easily track how successful yours have been through this Video Marketing Analytics dashboard template. Find out if your ROAS is satisfactory across platforms and if your video ads are generating enough awareness by monitoring Facebook ads reach and purchases, Google ad conversions, Total ad revenue, and other relevant metrics.
This dashboard will provide you with answers to these questions:
Browse more video marketing dashboards here.
Do you use PPC campaigns to boost your marketing efforts? This PPC Analytics dashboard template combines data from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads to give you a comprehensive picture of your ad campaign performance by measuring impressions, CTR, CPC, and other key metrics.
Through this dashboard, you’ll learn:
Browse more free PPC dashboards here.
Running an ecommerce business on Shopify? This Online Sales analytics dashboard is the ideal template for tracking everything that matters for your online sales: product performance, conversion rates, and audience.
Track metrics like total customers, average order value, top products by sales, and more, to answer questions such as:
Browse more free ecommerce dashboards here.
Do you have a referral marketing strategy in place? If so, you’ll want to know which websites bring the most traffic to your website and which ones convert. You can easily do it by setting up this Google Analytics Referrals Overview dashboard. You’ll learn what kind of referrals you should nurture in your future activities and if your efforts pay off.
Simply track metrics like sessions by referrers or goal completions by referrer, and you’ll answer questions such as:
Related: Here’s How to Increase Your Referral Traffic (Tips from 42 Marketers)
A clean desk allows you to focus on your tasks and doesn’t distract you from coming up with the best possible solutions for your challenges.
The same goes for your dashboards and reporting. Why scatter your attention around when you can monitor all important metrics and KPIs in one place instead of jumping from one screen to another 20 times within a single minute?
A clean, organized overview of your performance helps you identify issues more easily and act promptly. A messy analytics dashboard (or several overcomplicated, overcrowded dashboards) will likely lead to missed opportunities and issues caught too late.
With marketing reporting software like Databox, you can have access to:
That sounds about right—the best way to streamline your data monitoring and reporting and make time for more meaningful actions that lead to business growth.
Don’t waste another second, sign up for a forever free account today.
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