A PR Dashboard for Google Analytics

I recently wrote a post about Google Analytics for PR pros. After walking through what metrics I thought were important, I included a link to a PR dashboard for Google Analytics that anyone can add to Google Analytics. Here’s an explanation of the dashboard.

Automatically add the Google Analytics PR dashboard to your Google Analytics account

This dashboard is focused on the visitors to a website, where they came from and what they do on the site.

It starts with a simple count of people and how many sessions they created. This is a good way to get an idea of the normal trend of traffic and people. If there any abnormal? Did you do something to cause a bump?

Visitors and Visits Widget: Helps you understand the number of people and visits to your site.

Next we move on to goal conversions. This is a widget that you should update to reflect the goals you have configured on your site.

PR Dashboard Widget: Mesure Business Goal Completions

For me, this is the number of people that follow me on Twitter. For you it might be a lead or a product sale. The goal is to see how your actions change this trend (hopefully) for the better!

To configure this goal, just click on the little Pencil in the top right corner of the widget. Then choose your own goal from the list of Goal metrics.

Configure the dashboard widget to measure one of your specific business goals.

Moving down, it’s more about the behavior of the visitors.

Frequency measures how often the visit. It’s one of my favorite metrics. Most people only visit once. But you should check to see if your activities are bring people back multiple times.

The Frequency widget measures how often people visit the site. People who visit often are more valuable.

In addition to how often people visit, I also want to look at how engaged they are. For this I use the Depth of Visit or how deep people go into the site. In general people that move deeper into the site are more engaged.

The Page Depth widget measures how how many pages deep a visitors navigates on your site.

Next we move into where people came from, or the traffic sources. Each bar represents a different traffic channel, like organic, referral, etc.

The Traffic Sources widget identifies the top driver of traffic for your site. Does this align with your PR activities?

Notice how each bar is both green and blue? Green represents the returning visitors and blue represents the new visitors. This is giving me just a bit more information about my audience and if I’m attracting new people from these channels or returning people.

I now want to look at social channels. This widget is very similar to the previous. The only difference is that each bar is a different social network. Google Analytics will automatically create these grouping.

The Referring Social websites helps you identify traffic coming from social media activities.

And again, the green is new people coming from social networks and the blue is returning people.

Next is the top referring websites. Again, very similar to the two previous widgets. When you look at this data you should have some expectations. Do you see traffic from a referral you were not expecting? Use the context of your PR tactics to understand the data.

The referring sites widget shows which websites refer traffic to your website. Do you see any websites that you target in your PR activities?

Now let’s focus on visitor behavior on the site.

One thing that is really important in PR, and marketing, is amplifying your message and brand. Social Media is good at that. The next widget shows all social actions that happened on your site.

The social actions widget shows how often people engage with your content using social sharing tools, like Like buttons, Tweet Buttons, etc.

Each row is the name of a social network and the type of social action that happened on your site (+1, Like, Tweet, etc.)

Moving on we drill deeper into on-site sharing.

Now we’re looking at the most shared content on your site.

The Shared Content widget is similar to the social sharing widget. This is a specific list of all the pages that had some type of social action.

I like this because you can get a sense for how much people are sharing and WHAT they like to share. Are they sharing the stuff you are promoting?

NOTE: You need to make sure you have Google Analytics configured to track social activities for the previous two widgets to work.

Now let’s look at some keywords.

The next two widgets are Organic search terms. There is one widget for branded search terms and one for non-branded terms. Again, you need to customize these for your brand terms.

Non-branded organic search terms provide insight into what people are interested in. Remember, this excludes the (not provided) keyword.

Click on the little icon in the top of the widget to change my brand terms to your own.

Change the branded search term wizard to include the terms that are specific to your business.

The data in these tables is only the top 10 rows from the reports. Based on your actions and tactics there might be little change in the top 10 rows. Click on the name of the widget to jump to full report.

That makes 11 dashboard widgets. You’re allowed 12, but I wanted to give everyone space to add their on. So there you have it, a (somewhat rough) PR dashboard for Google Analytics.