One of the great new features of the ‘new Google Analytics’ are the custom dashboards. If you do not use them yet, you most definitely should. I’m using custom dashboards to measure SEO, PPC, ROI, conversions and more. I also made a custom dashboard for WordPress blogs using Yoast’s Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. I already shared it in Dutch on my own blog, but Joost asked me to share it with his readers as well. So here it is.
About the dashboard
This dashboard is meant to give a quick insight into all the important things you want to know about your blog at any given time. First of all I’d like to explain some metrics I’ve chosen to use in this dashboard. Firstly I chose to use visits instead of visitors because you also want to know when someone visits your blog multiple times. Secondly I chose to use unique page views instead of page views because I want to know how many people read my posts, not how many times they are read. Thirdly with this dashboard I tried to create insights into metrics about posts instead of metrics about all pages.
How to build this dashboard
First of all this dashboard of course contains a section regarding the most important core metrics. In this case I chose to include widgets containing the number of visits, the number of new visitors, a graph of the number of visits over the chosen period, the pages per visit and the average time on site. So far: nothing special. These widgets you can create without filtering any data.
Google Analytics for WordPress
For the following sections you need to use the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. The plugin will allow you to use custom variables to track post types, authors, categories and tags. In the settings of the plugin you can activate them in Custom Variable Settings (in advanced settings). These settings allow you to show the interesting data for your dashboard. Depending on which Custom Variables you use you have to tweak your dashboard. For this dashboard we’ve used the following settings:
When you use different settings you have to check which variable is saved in which custom variable key.
With these settings you are able to count the number of posts read on your blog and the most read posts. Because the plugin creates a custom variable containing the post type for each post that has been viewed you only need to filter the pages containing any kind of post type.
The widget settings for the number of posts read will look like this:
The widget settings for the most read posts will look like this:
The other custom variables created by the plugin allow you to show a few other interesting numbers. In this example we’ve chosen to show the most read authors and most read categories, but you could also show the most read tags or the number of posts by publication year.
The widget settings for the most read authors will look like this:
The widget settings for the most read categories will look like this:
Sources
Lastly the dashboard contains an overview of the most important traffic sources split up in used medium, social sources and used organic search terms.
Installation
I recommend you try to build this dashboard on your own. Not only to understand how it works but also to be able to choose to represent data in a different way. But of course I will provide you with a link to the dashboard configuration, which you can save to the desired profile in your Google Analytics account. Remember you need to have the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin installed as mentioned to be able to see all the correct data. Otherwise you still have to tweak the dashboard yourself.
Hope you enjoy your dashboard. Do you have any questions or suggestions? Leave a comment below.
I mentioned this to Brian Gardner from StudioPress several months ago about integrating Yoast’s plugin with the Genesis framework rather than their own built in SEO settings.
Nice but since the “not provided” came into analytics it is hard to get good data from analytics. Anyone an idea of when that will stop or will be an extra (paid) add-on?
Hey Steffen, This dashboard only has one widget that contains keyword data. I don’t think (not provided) devalues this dashboard that much. the dashboard is more focused on other aspects than keywords.
In general (not provided) does devalue analytics data but I don’t see Google changing its policy on this specific issue.
Why not? A lot of webmasters are complaining about this and I don’t see why you bring a tool but then later you change it so it will become less effective. I will wait for more positive comments for this specific tool before I will start to use it. Anyway thanks for the answer.
I really don’t feel analytics is getting correct data about my site. I have been growing a lot on access, pageviews, time per page, and my bound rate was rather small (=5% max). Suddenly, I got income visitors a bit decrease, lots of pageviews decrease (from 3 to 1.4), time (from 3mins avg to less than 1min), and bound rate overgrown to from 5 to 80%. I was using both yoast and analyticator plugin, but still… I compare data from different sources, and I still keep lots of people comming, they like the articles (which means they read more than two paragraphs) and certainly they don’t spend less than one minute there. For example, today, after one hour, I got nearly 80 people comming to one single post, 30 or so liked it, 10 commented, and guess what’s the avarage of time: 30… secs according to analytics. I took 4 minutes reading that article. My site is not low, it is not about celebrities, certainly it is the kind to which people come when they wanna read deep texts… So I really don’t know if this plugin is really working properly, or whatever it is making… O by the way, I have first pages for most of my articles. So, it is really not a matter of bounce rate being 80%
BTW, by Suddenly, I meant exactly from night till dawn.
This might be daft but why not run getclicky alongside GA?
Thanks Its great .As i don’t have to login into G A and check my stats gain and again..
@Jack This post guide how to create dashboard for Google Analytics, to check that you’ve to login in GA. This post not guide to show Google Analytics report or data in your WP dashboard.
I used sitemap.xml plugin to genrate sitemap. Now in my google webmaster is very error. 13,500 nofllow , 25 server errors and Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt
and Destroied the site map in google and no indexed the article in google
please see:https://www.google.com/search?q=%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%B2%D9%87+%D9%86%DA%AF%D8%A7%D8%B1&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
now I using Yoast plugin to generate sitemap_index.xml
this url:www.tazehnegar.net/sitemap_index.xml
befor;www.tazehnegar.net/sitemap.xml
Now if change sitemap.xml to sitemap_index.xml , no google problem?
how can change sitemaps.
Great, but does it work with Google’s 2 step verification?
Is there going to be a goal tracking feature with in wordpress as well?
I’m still trying to figure out the very basics of analytics. But I am trying Yoast for the first time and love it!
Thanks for the post. I plan on exploring this further to fully maximize this dashboard option.
It is difficult for me at the moment measure SEO, PPC, ROI. For this reason I search this plugin and I hope to learn how to use it soon.
Thank you for this interesting information.
Colo
Still getting my head around this, but its slowly starting to sink in. Will have to give it a go tomorrow.
Looks like an awesome plugin, will have to try it out.
Great plugin i think. Because after penguin and panda update social media become most important in Website promotion. This plugin is taking care about the social media participation in the website and keeping track of social media performance. Procedure to create the dashboard is also useful. I have a wordpress site ( http://www.cobwebseo.com/ ) and have social media presence and widget in footer. So i will definitely use this plugins to see the CUSTOM report in google analytic.
Another Cool Plugin from Yoast. I would like to test this out on my company blog. Will come back after my testing :)
it will be great to add also a WP dashboard widget to this plugin! People will love it :)
Thank you for this interesting information.Try…
Thanks alot for sharing .
Great tool I have to give it a go, I use WP SEO with all the websites we create for our clients and we love it, easy to use and very helpful to my clients when they take over to maintain and update their sites, and by the way we use Genesis Frame work also.
Shall try this plugin and the dashboard, many thanks I am sure will be great.
Awesome..
Looks like an great plugin, will have to try it out.
Thanks for the plugin. Its Awesome! :)
While I find this post interesting, and I did go through it. I run into a problem. When I setup the Google Anlytics for WordPress plugin, in the advanced options I checked off everything as recommended in this article. I cannot for the life of me find the place within my analytics account that I set the widgets for the custom variables. The screen shots in this article are very informative, but I just don’t see where I go within my analytics account to set one up. I assumed I need to go into “Custom Reporting” but that interface does not match what is in the screen captures above. Thanks for a great article and sharing your dashboard setup. I would appreciate a little extra help here :-)
Wow! I think I am having a blind moment. I no loger posted this and went back to my dashboard within my analytics account and saw the little gear icon in the upper right of the “Number of Posts Read” and was able to follow along with your post. Thanks again for such a great post and sharing your dashboard. Treading through the analytics dashboard can be a lot like crossing a mine field at times. So much learn.
Although I’m not using GA I think it might be time as this is a great feature. Currently I am using Mint stats which is a server app and gives alot of good info. It’s not so flash with PPC conversion but I thought I’de try it out for a run.
I’ve installed it onto my wordpress website and found it a little bit useful but lack of details.
If I setup a widget to view Most Read Authors, it does not populate the pie chart. I have CUSTOM VARIABLE (KEY 3) set as author, and I plug it in to a widget, and nothing.
If I look into my custom variables within Standard Reporting, I there can see the breakdown of pageview by authors, as I want.
This dashboard is a good idea. It needs refinement.
Interesting glitch.
Well, Great idea then. Do you have any plan about this? It’s strugle to go to GA to check the report. One stop done is much appreciate.