Newfangled's Advanced Measurement Dashboard

As I mentioned before, the dashboard (shown below) compiles what we've identified as some of the "greatest hit" reports from Google Analytics on the left side, while adding in new, custom reports on the right. The "greatest hit" reports we've chosen include most-viewed pages, referrers, search phrases, and visits-by-location maps. For the referrers and phrases reports, we added in a goal conversion column so that you could see which sources of traffic actually led to the goals you've identified in your Google Analytics account. The entire dashboard's time frame defaults to the last 7 days, but can be altered to show various intervals including 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year.



Because we've already looked at Google's analytics reports in great detail in our newsletter on How to Use Google Analytics and our webinar, Google Analytics 101, I'm now going to focus on only those new reports on the right side of our dashboard.

This report (above) is the most malleable one of the group- by entering a keyword that you'd like to track in the search field and then clicking "Add Keyword," you can begin tracking your ranking for it immediately. We display three ranking columns, which will show any change in ranking over the last three days. If your ranking changes, the difference will appear in the fourth column as either a positive (in green) or negative (in red) number. You can stop following a keyword at any time by clicking the delete button in the fifth column.

The New Leads report (above) shows the most recent leads captured by your site in reverse chronological order. By default, we show the last five, but you can expand that using the pulldown menu to show up to the last 25. You can also browse the list by using the paginated or "next" links to the left of the pulldown menu. Additionally, you can re-sort the list chronologically by clicking the arrow in the "date" column. By clicking an individual email address, or searching for an active address in the search field at the top, you will get a Lead Detail report (shown below) giving you much more information about that user.



The Lead Detail report (above) tells you when the system first started tracking the user, what form captured the user's email address (in this case, our webinar sign-up form), as well as which pages the user has browsed on the site. From the rundown of those pages, I can see that this new lead entered the site on a page about our content management system, viewed some example projects in our gallery, checked out our employees and our company's history, responded to a call to action in our sidebar for our webinars, and finally chose to register for the upcoming webinar in October on "The Modern Marketing Website."

The Most Active Sessions report (above) shows the 25 sessions with the greatest number of pages viewed, tracked by email address. You can filter out specific email addresses or domains so that your or your employees don't occupy the majority of the list. By clicking on a particular email address, you will get a Session Detail Report (shown below) giving you much more information about that particular user's session.



The Session Detail report (above) lists each page of a user's session, starting from the point of entry to the most recent page viewed. The first listing will show a referrer if the page was not accessed directly (in the case above, the user came to our site from a Google search). The columns on the right will also tell you the dates and times of each page's viewing, which is helpful in determining which pages were most interesting to a user. In this case, the user spent over five minutes on our homepage, probably viewing one of the videos featured there.

Unlike the reports I've just reviewed, which rely on data from custom tracking tools built by Newfangled, the On-Page Report (above) gives you a consolidated, page-specific digest of Google Analytics data (though it does also include our Google Tracker stats- a listing of all the various Google search queries that led traffic to the pages). You can expand and contract this report by clicking the tab at the top; each expansion reloads the Google Analytics data in real-time. One of the nicest features here is the Conversion Rate chart at the bottom, which shows the percentages of the page's traffic that went on to complete any goal you've listed in Google Analytics, as well as compares that page-specific rate to the sitewide-rate. To get a similar report from Google Analytics, you'd have to run an advanced segment report to refine a page's traffic report by a particular segment, in this case, only that traffic which included goal conversions (I demonstrated this in our newsletter on How to Use Google Analytics).

While the dashboard and on-page reports make our Website Management System the centralized, comprehensive tool it is today, it is important to note that it does not render Google Analytics obsolete. Technical limitations to Google's Analytics API currently restrict data output to particular metrics and combinations of metrics, which means that you will still want to use Google Analytics to run custom and advanced segment reports. The screenshot above shows a very simple advanced segment report running for the landing page of our newsletter, A Practical Guide to Social Media. I've combined a month's worth of traffic data for this page (the blue graph) with a report showing that 20% of its traffic over the past month led to one or more of our specified goal conversions (in orange)- either signing up for our newsletter, a webinar, or requesting a meeting. The spike around August 12th resulted from a link to our site from Smashing Magazine, which included us in it's post on Useful Web Design E-Mail Newsletters. Because they were promoting our newsletter, there was also a spike in goal conversions for that traffic. Much of the traffic to this particular newsletter around that time was a result of the referral from Smashing Magazine. (On that note, this wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been using Twitter- more on that here, if you're interested.)

But here's something truly exciting: Because we built the dashboard to be seamlessly integrated with our CMS, and we custom build every website around this system, we can add new custom reports to the dashboard, or custom metrics to the on-page report, as our clients need them. And as Google's Analytics API continues to be refined, there will be more possibilities in terms of adding the advanced segment reports you run most often to your dashboard, too. Third party applications cannot do this. They are restricted to a general offering because they do not have access to your site's database, nor the ability to expand or tweak it's functionality. The value of a centralized system is only as good as its ability to be refined or expanded based upon its user's unique needs.