SAMPLE DASHBOARD REPORT

Now that we understand some of Google Analytic’s terms, we can take a look at the elements of a dashboard report.

If you didn’t yet familiarise yourself with some basic Google Analytics terms, please see the Terms and Definitions page.

A dashboard report can be created to show some typical metrics that we would be interested in. Each report is limited to 12 widgets (sections). The report can be emailed periodically to the site’s administrator and other interested parties.

The elements of a typical report are shown below but you can download a sample Google Analytics dashboard report.

Remember that the data shown is for period of 30 days, the dates are shown top right.

Please see the various report sections below with a short explanation.

Sessions By Country

This diagram shows the sessions by country, the darker the blue colour the more sessions for that country. The bar at the bottom left provides a guide to the session numbers.

Traffic By Source

This diagram shows the traffic by source. Source meaning how the user found the site i.e. via a search engine, social media, direct entry into the browser.

Total Traffic

This graph shows the total number of users to the site each day. Remember that a user is really a device, as previously discussed.

Total Users

The total number of users who have visited the site.

Page Views

The total number of page views across the site.

The Average Number of Pages Per Session

The average number of pages per session.

The Average Session Duration

The average time visitors/users spend on the site.

Number of Contact Form Submissions

A custom goal which in this case specifies the number of times a contact form is submitted.

Traffic by Device Type

The traffic by device type indicates the type of device (desktop, tablet or mobile) used to access the site expressed as a percentage.

This may allow us to prioritise our efforts on a given device type if we see that one in particular has the majority of the traffic.

Traffic by Source

Traffic by source indicates how users came to the site, for example from a search engine, social media or by typing the website’s url into the browser (direct).

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate indicates the percentage of single page sessions. The lower the better.

Page Views and Bounce Rate by Source

This table displays the number of page views and bounce rate by source, which can be useful to determine if a particular source has a higher than average bounce rate.

Page Views and Bounce Rate by Page

It can be useful to check the bounce rate for each page, the number of page views tells us if the number of accesses is significant. Pages with a significantly higher than average bounce rate can be checked to see if there’s an obvious reason find out why people are leaving the site. This could be due to poor design, too little, irrelevant or poorly written content.