If you’re not a numbers person, Google Analytics can feel especially intimidating the first time you log in. However, for content marketers, the use of data has become crucial in determining your content’s effectiveness and impact on your company’s bottom line.
With so much data and capability, it’s easy to get lost in the granularity of Google Analytics. Dashboards are a great way to zoom out, focusing only on the insights that matter most to your company or organization’s content marketing goals. This will help you save time and reduce redundant clicks within your reporting while still keeping content marketing KPIs top of mind.
The best thing about Google Analytics Dashboards is that they’re free, and that there’s already an entire library of useful dashboards other people have created in the Solutions Gallery. The GA Solutions gallery is expansive; there are hundreds of thousand of submissions by different users. Here, we’ve chosen to highlight our top six Google Analytics Dashboards for measuring our content marketing efforts.
Import these dashboards into your Google Analytics profile today to start making more informed decisions and quantify the return on your content marketing investment.
Blog
Blogging is the cornerstone of your content marketing. It builds trust with your audience, boosts website traffic, improves SEO, generates leads, and helps close sales. However, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish these goals and demonstrate the ROI of content marketing without tracking key metrics related to your blogging efforts.
This handy Blogging Dashboard from Portent does just that. By filtering the information from your website to only display information related to your blog pages, this dashboard allows you to focus on the data that’s most important to your content team and reduce the time spent sorting through information related to other areas of your site.
Use this dashboard to stay on top of the general health of your blog. It prominently displays key metrics such as Sessions, the number of Pageviews, Average Time on Page, and Bounce Rate. It also tells you how people are finding your blog, which social channels are driving the most referral visits, and which articles are performing best. This information will help you identify your best-performing articles, and use that insight to plan future content ideas that will engage your audience.
Social Media
Social media helps you learn what your audience cares about, generate content ideas they will find relevant and engaging, and promote that content so they see it. In doing so, social media plays an essential role in the success of your content marketing by providing a channel for you to get feedback on your content and also get the word out about it.
Erik Wager’s Social Media Dashboard gives you a snapshot of which content is performing well on social media and which channels are helping you reach your content marketing goals. In doing so, this dashboard makes determining which social sites are sending you traffic that converts a no-brainer. To take full advantage of this dashboard, be sure that you first have Goals set up in Google Analytics to track the actions that matter most to your content marketing and your business.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another piece of the content marketing puzzle that contributes significantly to the overall success of your strategy. Your content should be focused on solving problems for your audience; problems they are already searching online for answers to. SEO helps optimize your content to be found organically by people who are searching for these solutions.
This SEO Dashboard created by Koozai helps you determine how well organic search is performing for your website. It highlights useful information such as Total Organic Visits, Top Organic Landing Pages, and Top Organic Keywords. You can even edit it to exclude branded keywords containing your company name and only focus on non-branded keywords. This should help you get a better idea of which content is performing best organically, check for unexpected results, and get a better understanding of where your SEO traffic is coming from.
Conversion Tracking
The goal of any great content marketer is to create compelling content that converts anonymous website visitors into an audience of loyal subscribers, leads, and hopefully, customers. This Conversion Tracking Dashboard from Moz helps you measure whether or not you’re actually accomplishing this.
Quite simple to make, this dashboard is going to look a little different for everyone who uses it. For your own, you may want to track key conversion metrics such as Engaged Visits (people who have viewed a certain number or pages), Resource Downloads (people who have converted into leads by filling out a contact form), and the number of Subscribers to your blog or newsletter.
Content Analysis
This Content Analysis Dashboard by Vagelis Varfis at Nudge Digital helps you dig deeper into how the content on your site or blog is performing. By analyzing key metrics such as Pageviews and Unique Pageviews, the Average Time on Page and Bounce Rate for certain pages, and Exits by page, you’ll be able to see which pages are underperforming or overperforming, and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Realtime overview
The Realtime Overview Dashboard created by Dan Barker provides an at-a-glance view of key content marketing metrics such as Total Active Visitors, New vs Returning Visitors, Top Active Pages, and Pageviews. More useful than the standard realtime view in Google Analytics, this dashboard will help you notice any sudden surges in web traffic to your blog, identify where that traffic is coming from, and develop a plan to capitalize on it as it’s happening.
Keep in mind that you may not use every dashboard on this list, and that these dashboards can be tweaked to better fit your own content marketing strategy and goals. Don’t see a dashboard that fits what you’re looking for? To create custom reports within Google Analytics, all you need to do is navigate to nearly any report review and click ‘Add to Dashboard’ in the header of the page.
One of the best things about creating dashboards is that they allow you to see the big picture and stay on track to meet your goals. If at any time you’d like to dig a bit deeper into the data to see what’s happening below the surface, it’s easy to do so by simply clicking on any widget’s title. This will take you to the relevant report within Analytics where you can see on a more detailed level what may be causing these results.
Do you have a favorite GA Dashboard or content marketing KPI? Give us a shout on Twitter and let us know.
