Google Analytics is an amazingly powerful tool when you can access the vast amounts of data collected on your users and their site interactions. However, this amount of data can sometimes be overwhelming to stakeholders who don’t spend as much time within analytics or for those of us who would like to have relevant information ready at a moment’s notice.

[Tweet “Overwhelmed by data? Analytics dashboards are the answer to this conundrum.”]

Dashboards are the answer to this conundrum. Here are 7 free and easy-to-use analytics dashboards you can import simply by clicking the link, selecting your favorite view and following the provided instructions.

How to Download a Dashboard:

1 – AdWords Performance Dashboard

AdWords provides some wonderful measurement tools within its platform, but it’s always helpful to see how those users are interacting with your site once they have clicked past the ad. Not only will this dashboard show you performance metrics on keywords, cost and more, but it will also isolate goal completions by campaign.

2 – Campaign Tracking Dashboard

If you are doing any offline marketing, social media amplification or email marketing, you should definitely leverage Google Analytics campaigns to measure the performance and overall ROI for each of your marketing activities. With all of these activities to manage, however, it can sometimes be easy to overlook the performance of each campaign. This dashboard will give you a centralized hub for your campaign activity.

If you are not currently using campaign tracked URLs, I highly recommend you read Hayley’s blog on campaign tracking and get started today.

3 – Event Activity Dashboard

This dashboard requires you to have event tracking currently set up on your site to measure significant site interactions. This can be anything from form completions to YouTube events.

The dashboard will automatically pull your top 10 events in the first widget, and you will then need to copy the event categories listed in that widget to the filters in the remaining widgets. Simply copy the first event category from the first widget, click the edit button on the widget titled ‘Event 1’ and paste the event category in the title and filter fields. Wash, rinse and repeat for the remaining widgets.

4 – Goal Completion Dashboard

Ever want to be able to quickly see a comprehensive breakdown of your goal activity by source/medium without having to navigate down to your conversions tab? This dashboard will provide total conversion numbers and conversion rates for all source mediums to start, but the remaining widgets will break down each goal specifically for your top 10 analytics goals.

5 – SEO Performance Dashboard

SEO has become more difficult to measure without using specialized tools such as SEMRush or MOZ (both of which are fantastic tools) since Google began using the dreaded (not provided) keyword.

There is, however, valuable information within Google Analytics related to the organic traffic coming to your site. This dashboard will help you leverage this information for your own search optimization efforts. To take full advantage of this dashboard, be sure to replace all ‘BRAND TERM’ fillers in the branded and non-branded widgets with your own branded keywords. An example would be a regular expression that looked like this: converge consulting|converge|converge marketing.

6 – Social Media Dashboard

If you partake in any social media activity for your institution, you should be monitoring the results of this activity to help justify the time spent creating and curating your posts. This dashboard will help inform what your user base looks like and what those users are doing once they are on the site. Tying your goal conversions to social activity is extremely helpful in proving ROI.

7 – Top Pages Dashboard

While some of this data is available in the ‘All Pages’ report, this dashboard builds upon that information by also providing a breakdown of your top landing pages, top site sections and more. Once you have imported this dashboard, be sure to replace the /SECTION/ in the “Top /SECTION/ Pages” widget with either the top page path level 1 from the widget just above or with the most strategically valuable section of your site, whether that be /admissions/, /future-students/, etc.

[Tweet “These 7 dashboards are a great start to streamlining reporting within your Google Analytics account.”]

These 7 dashboards are a great start to streamlining reporting within your Google Analytics account. When you have them imported, be sure to schedule these dashboards to be distributed in a regular email so you can have visibility to your data. Once you are comfortable with these dashboards, the sky’s the limit! There are endless varieties of custom dashboards you can build to best suit your data needs.