Do you have Google Analytics installed on your website, but never access it? Why? The answer we get a lot from content creators is that they are already investing a lot of time and energy creating their content and improving their SEO that they don’t have any additional time left for analytics. Unfortunately, skipping analytics has the detrimental effect of overlooking an incredibly useful tool that can help determine the life or death of a website. After all, isn’t it important to be able to gauge if all that time and energy is actually working or, worse, not working?
Google Spreadsheets Add-ons
For some users, setting up analytics can be a daunting task. Even experienced users find it cumbersome. Thankfully, there is a simpler way! Google’s Spreadsheets, located in Google Drive, has add-ons that can be set up to display graphs generated from analytics accounts. Once it is set up, reports are generated through Google Sheets.
What the Add-On can do:
- Pulls data from Analytics into the spreadsheet
- Create custom reports from Analytics data
- Create graphs and embed them on a third-party website
- Schedule reports to run and update automatically
- Control who can see the data through sharing and privacy settings
Furthermore, you can also create a live Google Analytics dashboard, which can be embedded into a webpage. The dashboard can be inserted into a non-indexed sub-domain page on your website where you can share it with all the employees of your company (with additional password protection available for security). The dashboard can be set on a schedule and run everyday, once a week, or once a month.
Real-time Dashboard
Creating the report below, for instance, should take about a half hour and then hardly any time to run afterward once you have embedded it to your website page. Even if you choose to not embed the graphs to your site, you will still have data that can be easily applied to reports via pdf by using the Report Configuration tool.
To get started, we recommend Moz.com’s excellent page for step-by-step set up instructions plus Google’s video tutorials for a more detailed overview. As you will see, it is very simple to use and can be customized to whatever parameters you want to access in your Google Analytics account. Overall, it is a value added tool whose automated, real-time reports can save you a lot of guesswork when it comes to understanding where your website traffic is coming from.
Based in Rochester, New York, Netsville is an Internet Property Management company specializing in managing the Digital Marketing, Technical, and Business Solutions for our customers since 1994. For more information, please click here.
