Website Analytics Dashboard

An essential, but often overlooked, aspect of building a successful Internet business is to build a website analytics dashboard into your site from day one. Without this capability from the start, you can miss the opportunity to get real-time feedback on your business. When discussing administrative dashboards, we differentiate between those dashboards which you use to manage your business (passwords, upload content, etc) and the ones that give you information about traffic and usage patterns on your website, which we call analytics.

A website analytics dashboard provides you with the data that you need in order to make decisions that will grow your business. The dashboard should give you information like this:

• where traffic is coming from
• what keywords bring conversion
• what pages lead to more clicks, which ones dead-end
• which landing pages create more business

Google leads the way with its website analytics tool, geared to telling you how people find your site, how they navigate through, and who convert to customers. It uses a graphical interface. See Google Analytics

The main point is that there is no reason to delay the use of the analytics. It is the most important, real piece of information you have. Use it and grow your business; ignore it and you may flounder quite a while trying to hit your market.

For more in-depth articles, see Entreprise Dashboard

What to Measure

Understanding the metrics is another story. For articles and blogs, visit these sites:

Domain Masters

Understanding Google Analytics

Five rules for High Impact Dashboards