How to Create an Analytics Management Dashboard for your Website? – Part 2: KPI’s & Example Dashboards

Last week I wrote about some basics of webanalytics dashboards and explained how to make nice visualizations with excel charts. In fact, I would like to stay at excel this week as I’m getting more and more convinced of the enormous database potential the program offers. Some excel-advantages I discovered during my dashboard journey:

• It corresponds perfectly with data from major webanalytics tools (like Google Analytics or WebTrends)
• Information can be easily published in PDF
• Ease month-to-month (or year-to-year) analysis: define statistics, set targets, make a format and every month can be directly analysed
• Avoid people accessing the original web analytics tool (because these reports are often not usable for presenting the essential information compared to the dashboard)
• Include comments for evaluating reasons
• Choose from an enormous pool of free excel plugins different tools for fancy charts, specialized templates, tutorial software and other add-ons.

Ofcourse there are many more reasons for using excel – as also mentioned last week. But these above I really appreciate when executing such activities for a management board. If there are still some excel critics while reading this article, make a quick sidestep to discover if you’re making these mistakes ;)

…

Alright, now you’re totally convinced of using excel for business purposes. Let’s head on to this week’s subjects: what’s the essential information – or key performance indicators (KPI’s) – you want to report in the dashboard and how will this look like?

By taking a closer look to webstatistics for a management dashboard, you firstly need to know what factors drive your results. These are the Key Performance Indicators. For the effectiveness of your website you can take a look to:

• Unique visitors
• Visits
• Visits / visitors rate – degree of loyalty toward the site
• Bounce rate – are you really attracting visitors from your target group?
• Page views – Do you serve functional content, are your visitor engaged?
• Page views / visits

In addition you want to know the trend of these indicators, monthly increases or decreases or a comparison to the previous year in this period. In order to take action if necessary. A dashboard for such information can look like this:

Now, let’s assume you’re running a webshop. This is somewhat more exciting. eCommerce managers needs to get direct monetary information in order to take actions for online revenue enhancement. Here, the dashboard as stated above needs to be enriched with eCommerce information like:

• Customers
• Orders
• Items
• Items / order
• Average Order size – Share of wallet
• Revenues
• eCommerce conversion – Orders by visit (or customers / visitors)

Displayed like:

Another graph that I really like (which is also easy to plugin at excel) is the waterfall chart. This is especially useful when you’re selling in different product categories and running an active online advertisement policy:

These are some examples for creating a custom Management Dashboard in excel with website analytics. So far the KPI’s addressed are basic factors, important for taking actions about conversion optimization. Next week we will take a closer look to the different KPI’s of your website, for example when it comes to online marketing. Stay tuned :)

Tagged: eBusiness & Consultancy, KPI's, Management Dashboard, webanalytics