The Publisher's Dashboard for Google Analytics

Get all of your most important analytics in one dashboard - and actually understand them

Google Analytics offers a ton of value to small publishers, especially since it is free to use. But navigating Google Analytics and gathering important insights takes time, even if you know what you’re doing. Google Data Studio and its powerful data visualization features can help with its endless possibilities for building and customizing dashboards, but it has a learning curve of its own. If you are just looking for a free dashboard template you can use, there are lots of free templates out there, but usually they are either so simple they don’t tell you anything new or are so complicated they create new problems.

That’s why we created The Publisher’s Dashboard

The Publisher’s Dashboard is a free Google Data Studio report template that we created to give an online publisher everything they need to know about their site in 5 minutes - giving you back the minutes or hours that you would spend lost in Google Analytics trying to piece together the same insights.

The report has 4 pages:

1. Views Summary

In one quick glance you can see how your website views are trending in the last day, week, month and year. Along with that, you can get a feel for the time of day and week that people visit your site along with demographics and information about the device they are using. This is the place to start to understand the overall performance of your site or blog.

2. Views Explorer

On this page, you can drill deeper into how individual pieces of content perform as well as what channels are driving traffic to your site. In one view, you can see the top organic search terms, referral sites, and social media views, either for your site as a whole or for individual posts. All of this can be analyzed for any time-frame. Here you can understand which of your posts are getting the most traffic and where that traffic is coming from.

3. Content Engagement

Views aren’t everything though, and on this page you can see more detail about how your content is engaging your readers. Here you can see your top posts not just in terms of views, but also in terms of reading time - and importantly, it is split between new and return visitors. This way, you can quickly see which posts are bringing new visitors to your site and also which posts are bringing repeat readers back to your site and keeping them engaged.

4. Email Engagement

Finally, on the last page you can quickly understand the performance of your email newsletters. You can see overall how many emails you are sending in a time period along with how many opens and clicks they are getting. At the same time, you can instantly see the same view split out by individual marketing campaign or newsletter. This way, you can quickly compare your email marketing campaigns or newsletters to see which ones are engaging and connecting with your readers.

Note this page of the template uses our Mailchimp Connector for Data Studio - you can try it out for free for 14 days with no credit card details required.

How to Use the Publisher's Dashboard Template for Google Analytics