Paradise by the (Google Analytics) Dashboard Light!

So we’re going to get a little technical here on Kilted Chaos, but hopefully not too technical! We’ve talked and talked to you about your website and how simple it can be, now let’s look at another key tool you should be using, at least on a semi regular basis to keep an eye on things: Google Analytics! Also, please welcome the first of hopefully many guest appearances by COREY TRENT (@ctrentmarketing from Twitter), who helped shape this post and will be joining us at Kilted Chaos to help us, help you make sense of your websites traffic!

Now of course there are plenty of stats packages you could use to track your website’s health and effectiveness, but we particularly like Google Analytics because it’s FREE!

Corey’s Response:
One thing we hear from many people on the web, is that Google Analytics is overwhelming. It is our goal here to show how easy business changing information can be had through this powerful tool. Today the crux of the conversation is going to be on, customizing the opening dashboard. As a business owner we understand your plate is full, so having a 1 step process to see important information is essential. If you are unsure how to add items to your Google Analytics Dashboard, Stay tuned for our upcoming Google Analytics Dashboard Customization Aid.

Here is a custom dashboard we mocked up earlier . You will notice there are some number notions which we go more in depth below the screenshot:

THE BREAKDOWN!

1) BASIC TRAFFIC:
This section is your basic stats in an easy to read chart, and by looking below you get a quick breakdown of how many visits in your specified time period (By default 1 month), how many pageviews, time on site, # of pages per visitor and % of new visits.  All of these are straightforward with the exception of “Bounce Rate” – which we’ll get into in detail in another post too. (For now suffice to know – low bounce % = good, high bounce % = bad!)

2) WHERE THEY CAME FROM:
Direct, referral (from another site linking to you) or Search Engine. Our suggested hierarchy for this is:

1: Search Engines - This is super cool, because it is people that have found your site among the millions of others using tools like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

2: Referrals - Marvelous! This means that blogs, review sites, twitter users, etc are talking about you (see, we were right about this social media stuff after all!)

3: Direct Traffic – Important, but less so, because all this really means is people remember your name! Don’t sweat this one too much!

Corey’s Response: For some restaurant owners Referrals might be a much more important metric to watch than Search Engine. Many restaurants I imagine get traffic from restaurant directories or 10 ten city lists. This information can be important because they might see a need to try to go after better or premier placement on these sites.

3) TRAFFIC SOURCES:
Basically a deeper drilldown of #2 – this shows your top five traffic sources, from which you can dig deeper and find out more about the referral inks, etc your site is getting. Again, if “direct” traffic is in there, don’t spend much time on that stat, keep thinking in terms of “What are people saying?” and  “What are people searching for?” Which leads us to …

4) KEYWORDS:
This is an important one to watch! You would think people would most often search for “Your City” “restaurant”, which is a bit of a given, but they might be searching for:

• A specific style of restaurant
• Type of cuisine
• Budget level
• Atmosphere/ customer reviews
• Special events/ Live Music
• Their favorite dish
• Party room availability/ Banquets
• Family friendly establishments

You might be surprised the words people search for and land on your site with!

Corey’s Response: This is also an important metric to look at in gaining insight on the expectation people have before coming to the site.  So if you see that tons of people are coming to the site on a certain keyword, ensure that they see elements on the site that connect with that.  People sometimes are in a hyper mode when they are on the Internet.  If they do not find something that connects with them on the page (typically within 5 seconds), they are gone.  The main point with the keyword report is, you are getting clues of what people want to see on the site.  So if it is a top keyword and relevant to your business, do your best to ensure that in a clear way you connect with that on your homepage.

5) VISITOR LOYALTY:
Simple! How many times do people visit your site? If you’re the kind of restaurant that say does a lot of parties, live music, etc, you want to see a strong visitor loyalty. Same goes if you have a strong following because of your daily specials, you should see that visitor loyalty figure climb up because you’re publishing your specials to your “promotions board”.

Corey’s Response: Also, you can create items on your site that will cause people to return or traffic your site more regularly. For example, internet only coupons or special menu items that can only be seen online (this is hip with restaurants appealing to the younger demographic). Interactive and exclusivity are big reasons for people to make your site a more regular destination. Also, try to collect information so you can stay in touch like email addresses. You can send these people emails on specials or information to keep them coming to your site and thinking about your restaurant.

- Darn good point Corey, And let’s not forget “tagging” print ads with a custom URL, so that you can quickly and easily track the success of them!

6) TOP CONTENT:
It is what it says – it’s your own little billboard hot 100 of what pages people visit on your site frequently and pages people do not! It is simple, but golden information to have!

Corey’s Response: In looking at this report, if some of your more important pages are not showing up, then look to adjust where they are placed on the website (not being seen by users easily). In addition, look at what the links or buttons that takes users to these pages say.

Now, obviously this is a pretty simple dashboard, and different sites will have different facts and figures they’d want to watch (Or “KPI”  as the big guys would say.) We just wanted to show the type of things you can put on to your dashboard. It’s pretty obvious if your site is heavily blog based then you don’t need to see the same figures as an e-commerce site, if you’re using WordPress for real estate listings, then the map overlay suddenly becomes much more important, etc etc.

And that  about wraps  it for this post – consider this “Analytics in a nutshell“! We’d love your comments, and feel free to contact us via the form, or at any of the following Twitter profiles:

Alex: @kilted_alex

Andrew: @kilted_andrew

Corey Trent: @ctrentmarketing

- We’re planning to have Corey back to help with follow up posts on Analytics and are also planning a “round Table” blog post that will discuss Site Analytics and YOU! The small business owner. Email us or tweet us with any questions you’d like us to cover during the conversation. And remember to tune in on Wednesday mornings to the #kiltfeed on Twitter too!

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LASTLY: We plan to run some more intensive, customized Google Analytics Dashboards on the Kilted Chaos blog, but this is where YOU come in! What we’d like to do is – take your current Google Analytics dashboard and turn it into an easy to understand, data-puke free report that you can easily download and understand, and most importantly act upon.
We won’t be doing this alone – we’ve talked a lot with @ctrentmarketing, who knows way more than we do about analytics and he’s going to jump into the blog posts and break things down in relation to the different types of dashboards you can have, etc. Corey is a genius with Analytics and our reports, combined with his commentaries on the figures contained on the reports will really give you good readers a much better handle on how EASY it can be to use Google Analytics to improve your business!
In return for this  valuable service, we get to report on the process on the chaosophy, using an anonymous screenshot of your dashboard front page – it’s a win win deal as corporate-America used to say!

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Tagged as: Analytics, Bounce rate, business owner, Corey Trent, Dashboard, Google, google analytics, Google Analytics for Small Business, Google Analytics Tutorials, Google Inc., Googler Analytics Dashboard Customization, Internet, Search Engine, Small Business Analytics, small business owner, Small Business Websites, Social media, Twitter, Twitter Inc, Web analytics, Yahoo! Inc.