Google Analytics is at the heart of retail websites around the globe, recently tipping the scales in over 50% of surveyed sites. Website owners are attracted by the easy installation, intuitive user-interface and of course the price point (free), as well Google’s reputation for innovation in the online industry.
Many medium to large sized business owners will find that what Google Analytics lacks compared to its paid-for rivals is the big budget investment in customised reporting.
Google Analytics Dashboards
Google have made a valiant effort recently with their new customised dashboard, an extremely useful feature which allows you to build up a dashboard of your favourite widgets, all of which will load when you arrive. From here you can even download as PDF or in Excel, or schedule a regular report by email.
What’s this good for? Well let’s say you have a site which sells things. You probably know how much you sell each week, but you need to know where these customers are coming from in order to manage your business.
Head over to your dashboard, hit ‘Add a widget’ and make a pie chart showing Transactions grouped by Source (see below).
Ta-da! Well almost half of the sales shown here came direct, no surprise there as I know about half of my transactions are from repeat customers, but there’s a new site in 3rd place whose traffic has generated 30 sales. I should head over to that site and find out why, and maybe cut a deal with the site owner to promote this further.
What if I now want another widget which just shows the same information for a sub-set of products, perhaps the most profitable ones? Well this is where we reach the limits of the Google Analytics Dashboards, as segments and sub-sections of tables can’t be applied here.
Vuedata
For business dashboards and reports which require a bit more customised functionality, third party tools are available which will allow me to create these views automatically.
Vuedata is a new tool launched to allow site owners to build automatic dashboards quickly and easily, with no manual intervention. It pulls its data straight out of Google Analytics, so no code changes are required to get it working.
Vuedata’s interface follows the same familiar list of dimensions and metrics as the dashboard from Google Analytics, allowing you to quickly recreate reports. The headline feature is segmentation, making Vuedata one of the only external tools which allows advanced segmentation on all of your reports.
Creating My Business Dashboard with Vuedata
Once inside Vuedata, my report can be recreated by selecting ‘source’ from the list of dimensions and ‘transactions’ from the list of metrics. I also enter ‘-transactions’ in the sort box to ensure that the report shows the highest numbers first, and select ‘Last 3 months’ as my date range.
Hitting generate brings up my data in bar graph form, and flicking this over to Pie Chart gives me the end result I was looking for:
My favourite feature is the ‘Save to dashboard’ button, which saves all settings for future use.
Building on the example above, I’m also able to create a sub-report which looks specifically at my most important product. To do this I can create a segment, which is achieved through the slick new segmentation interface. In this example I’m segmenting ‘productName’ contains ‘widget’ to focus in on visitors who bought a specific item:
Using my Business Dashboard with Vuedata
Once set up, all my business reports are helpfully stored within the My Dashboard section of the site.
From here, all reports can be reopened, edited or shared using the build-in shortlink feature. The real business benefit here is convenience.
Once created, I can take any graph, and copy the automatically generated code into a blog, intranet site or client report.
The polished chart appears automatically and even allows viewers to hover and click on it to see further detail.
Vuedata is available to anyone who currently has a Google Analytics account.. Head over to www.vuedata.com to find out more.
