Google Analytics DashboardsThere have been many developments with Google Analytics (GA), and the short and overdue message is that you need to be using it – or some type of analytics tool with similar functionality.  A recent blog post outlined all you need to know to add Google Analytics on your website or blog.  It’s free, quick, and easy and can immediately begin providing valuable information to you about your website traffic and visitor behavior.

Google has done a lot of development to improve upon GA, making it even easier for you to watch and share data.  To touch on just one thing, Google now offers a Solutions Gallery. The gallery is a list of prebuilt custom reports, dashboards, and advanced segments. You select the appropriate ‘business function’ and ‘marketing function’ and it will display a list of prebuilt configurations and settings that you can select from.

For example, you may like to see a dashboard of analytics that monitors pay-per-click (PPC) traffic and organic traffic separately, or is focused on the behavior of social media. You can modify the dashboards provided, or create your own as well. Segments are set up for anything from long tail keywords (by number of keywords) to branded traffic, or ad position for a Google AdWords campaign.  (This one could be key in conversion analysis on Google SEM ad spend.)  Along those same lines, you could optimize your AdWords campaign based on match types with a Matched Query Report or a PPC Performance report.

The examples are countless, and continuing to be developed. Any of these reports can easily be shared with others using their GA login credentials, or scheduled for email delivery if that is your preference.

It’s always nice to have this much directly targeted data to review, and to do so is incredibly easy. It’s just a matter of discovering and tweaking which set of resources are most fitting for your business needs.