All You Need To Know About Analytics Dashboard

It is a common scenario in organizations when an employee blames another employee for something terrible that happened to the company, such as failing deadlines. Another common thing in organizations is not knowing whom to follow up precisely for a specific task.

These messy situations can create severe problems and a toxic working environment. An analytics dashboard can be a perfect solution if you want to avoid such situations in your company.

In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about web analytics dashboards with real-time examples. So stay tuned!

What Is an Analytics Dashboard?

The Analytics dashboard shows real-time key performance metrics in the form of an interactive graphical user interface.

For example, Google Analytics provides you with a web analytics dashboard that displays data like site traffic, conversion rates, etc. 

Advantages Of Using Web Analytics Dashboard

The following are the key benefits of using a web analytics dashboard.

1. Analytics dashboard saves time by making performance metrics easy to understand.
2. It provides you with real-time insights into a particular area of your business.
3. A real-time web analytics dashboard helps you to forecast better.
4. Dashboard analytics helps you identify and resolve performance issues.
5. It helps organizations gain control over inventory.
6. A web analytics dashboard provides in-depth performance reports that can also include data from outside sources, such as competitor analysis. 
7. Lastly, it helps organizations to make better decisions by providing an overview of key performance indicators.

A Step-By-Step Guide For Creating A Data Analytics Dashboard

Now, let’s move forward to the step-by-step guide for creating a data analytics dashboard.

Here you go!

Step-1: Define The Purpose

The first thing you must remember while creating an analytics dashboard is its purpose.

You need to clearly understand who will use the dashboard and what answers they want your dashboard to provide. For example, your digital marketing team would expect the following answers from an SEO analytics dashboard,

1. Which search queries rank your website best in search results?
2. How much organic traffic does your website drive?
3. How many organic visitors respond to your call to action?

However, you must ensure that your dashboard analytics does not include too many parameters so that it’s easy to navigate.

Step-2: Choose Correct Metrics

The purpose of your analytics dashboard defines the metrics you need to include in your dashboard. The following is a list of the most common analytics dashboards and the performance metrics they include.

Analytics Dashboard Type	Performance Metrics
Web/Website	Website traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate.
SEO	Keyword Rankings, organic traffic, backlinks.
Digital Marketing	Blog traffic, average time on page, email opening rate.
PPC	Click-through rate, impressions, cost-per-click.
Ecommerce	Unique visitors, average order value, cart abandonment rate.
Social Media	Followers, impressions, engagement rate.
Product	Churn rate, daily active users, customer lifetime value.
B2B Sales	Sales revenue, average deal size, lead response time.
Financial	Monthly recurring revenue, gross profit, net profit.
Customer Service	Ticket volume, average response time, customer satisfaction score.

Step-3: Collect Raw Data

Next, you must identify sources from which you can collect performance-related raw data. Most content management systems offer built-in analytics that allows you to create a web analytics dashboard.

For example, Shopify offers an analytics page to track performance metrics like average order value and total sales. 

However, setting up Google Analytics 4 can be another great alternative to collect raw data for your dashboard analytics. The following are a few other effective sources for collecting analytics dashboard data,

1. Digital marketing tools like RankWatch
2. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools like Salesforce and HubSpot
3. Financial systems like Xero and QuickBooks
4. Email marketing platforms like Lemlist and Mailchimp
5. Social media platforms like LinkedIn and X
6. Internal databases and Google Spreadsheets

Step-4: Select A Tool

You need to select a dashboard-creating tool in this step. Many tools and analytics platforms offer built-in dashboards that you can customize as per your needs. Some of them also allow you to include data from other outside sources.

Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console make analytics dashboard creation a breeze.

However, choosing a popular data visualization tool like Google Looker Studio can be an effective alternative to creating analytics dashboards.

The free tool lets you import and view data from various external sources.

Step-5: Design And Share

Once you finalize your analytics dashboard creation tool, you are all set to build, customize,  and share your dashboard.

However, it would be helpful to remember the following tips while designing your analytics dashboard,

1. Place the most essential performance metrics at the top of the analytics dashboard.
2. Group performance metrics type-wise to absorb information quickly.
3. Choose the most appropriate data visualization options.
4. Include targets and/or benchmarks to define numbers.
5. Include data for the time frame that satisfies the needs.

Once you finish designing your dashboard analytics, share it with concerned employees of your organization. Let them get familiar with using the dashboard for some time (say two weeks) and then ask for the following feedback from them.

1. Which dashboard metric they found most useful?
2. Which dashboard metrics can be added further?
3. Did they face any difficulties understanding or using the dashboard?

This feedback will help you plan further iterative improvements to your dashboard analytics.

Examples Of Analytics Dashboard

Here are some examples of various analytics dashboards to explain things to you better.

SEO Analytics Dashboard

SEO analytics dashboard displays your website’s technical SEO health (Site Score) and the real-time performance of SEO metrics. It also shows your site’s various types of SEO issues and categorizes them according to their types and criticality.

You can choose the RankWatch site auditor for this purpose. The tool provides a snapshot of your website’s SEO performance. You can also opt for RankWatch’s on page SEO checker to get suggestions for on-page SEO optimization and include those insights in your dashboard analytics.

You must perform a backlink audit using the RankWatch online backlink checker tool to identify low-quality backlinks from less authoritative sources and include those data in your dashboard analytics.

Web Analytics Dashboard

A web analytics dashboard tracks and measures how visitors interact with your website. Google Analytics offers a web analytics dashboard that shows key performance metrics like new users, average engagement time, and total revenue at the upper left part of the tool page.

The tool displays user behavior trends over time in the form of easily accessible line charts and offers data for the last 28 days by default.

The tool also reflects real-time data on the number of users over the last 30 minutes and the countries they are visiting from. Google Analytics also allows users to customize their data.

Keyword Rankings Dashboard

A keyword ranking dashboard is an SEO dashboard that displays keyword performance and the ranking URLs for that search term (keyword).

The RankWatch rank tracking tool provides you with keyword performance metrics like keyword rank, search volume, share of voice, URL ranking for that keyword, etc., which you can include in your dashboard analytics.

Social Media Analytics Dashboard

A social media analytics dashboard helps you measure your website’s performance across different social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, and LinkedIn.

Google Analytics offers a social media analytics dashboard that shows performance metrics like number of page visits, page views, and activities across various social media platforms.

Final Thoughts

Analytics dashboards provide past and real-time insights on your key performance metrics. That, in turn, helps you identify issues without delay and resolve them immediately. It also ensures that the stakeholders know whom to pursue for a pending task, thus eradicating the chances of miscommunication among employees. 

Dashboard analytics plays an essential role in keeping track of various tasks and achieving goals within the stipulated time. It helps organizations to make faster and better decisions. However, you must carefully choose the right tools to collect raw data that must be included in your analytics dashboard.