Google Analytics helps nonprofits understand their website. Period. It’s visual representations of data makes the task of aggregating and crunching data much easier and less time consuming.
From knowing what time of the day your website get’s the most traffic, to the part of the world those impressions are coming from, Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for your nonprofit.
That being said, when you first take a look at the program’s interface, it can be a little intimidating. It’s very easy to see the seemingly infinite number of statistics and data points and close your browser. We fear things that intimidate us, it’s what makes us human.
However, the power of Google Analytics can not be ignored. We’ve talked about this in previous blog posts.
Benefits of custom dashboards
Instead of thumbing through the maze of drop down menus and seemingly infinite options, creating a custom dashboard makes it easy to log in, grab a quick data point, and get out. What’s more, you might be only interested in reporting on two or three different data points at the outset of your website optimization initiative. Adding these two or three ‘widgets’, as they’re referred to as in Google Analytics, to a custom dashboard makes it possible for even novices to quickly see how the website is performing.
The good news is you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The pervasiveness of Google Analytics has led to a plethora of pre-made dashboards available to anyone who wants to use them.
Here are a few of our favorite lists that will help your nonprofit get started collecting and analyzing its website data.
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20 custom Google Analytics dashboards from 5 Star Net
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5 insightful Google Analytics dashboards from Moz
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10 useful Google Analytics custom dashboards from Econsultancy
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5 more Google Analytics custom dashboards from crazyegg
