Cotton Eye Joe Analytics: Where do they come from? Where do they go?

Today I’m going to show you the simplest, most important dashboard your business needs.

With this dashboard and the right creative, analytical process, you’ll be able to:

1. Build – a powerful, results-driven website.
2. Measure – metrics that matter to the business (not vanity metrics).
3. Learn – what’s working and what’s not in order to produce results.
4. Repeat – keep building, knowing with clarity and confidence that you’ll get results.

The Dashboard

This Google Data Studio dashboard is broken into three reports.

These three reports tell us three incredibly important details about any website (a prerequisite is that you have goals set up on Google Analytics  – that’s a link to a how-to article). Goals can literally be anything, but they should be the most valuable actions people can take on your website (form completions, clicks to call or email, email subscribers, sales, etc.) They should not be vanity goals like time-on-site or visiting more than 1 page.

1. Where do they come from?
2. Where do they go?
3. What do they do?

If you sing the song, “Cotton Eye Joe” to #1 and #2 you’ll have a lot of fun. I know I did.

Goal Completions by Source

This tells us where the most valuable people visiting the website are coming from (google, yahoo, email, paid ads, etc.).

Top Landing Pages by Goal Completions

This tells us what pages people enter the site through by goal completions. We can even select individual goals and see what the conversion rates are to know what the best-performing pages are. It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean goal completions happen on these pages, but these pages were the start of the journey to a goal completion.

Goal Completion by Type

This tells us exactly what they did (filled out a specific form, clicked to call, made a purchase, etc.).

With this dashboard:

• You are able to get clarity on the health of your website as a vital asset to the growth of your business.
• You can identify gaps in source traffic. (ex: you are getting paid conversions, but aren’t investing in SEO, so add it to the mix).
• You can find areas to increase your conversion rate (the number of people that take action and complete a goal).
• You can see improvement over time and decrease the risk of bad marketing decisions over time.

So, do you want the dashboard? Comment on this post and say, “send me the details.”