Don't miss your own viral explosion: Email this dashboard to yourself.
The thing that really gets me about @sakun 's story of going viral on Reddit was that he had the data and didn't see it!
That's an avoidable mistake. Have a dashboard and set it to email to yourself weekly, and never have fear of missing your big break again.
(That's not to pick on @sakun - I'm glad he discovered his success!)
If you have a favorite tool, read on:
Google Analytics
Click here and you can save this dashboard template to your own instance:
https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=ERC1CQcQRNuQHhhzCUMYSA
That is my very own "first" dashboard I check for my own projects. It lets you understand your traffic at a glance.
Easter egg: The title of each report is a hyperlink to a GA report relevant to that detail that you're seeing in the reportlet. This should make it easier for you to navigate GA.
Mixpanel
If you create a Dashboard first, you can email it to yourself (an Email Digest, in their lingo):
https://help.mixpanel.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000256403-Dashboard-Email-Digests
Amplitude (not on free tier)
If you create a Dashboard first, you can email it to yourself under Settings.
Note that this is only available on paid plans:
https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/229505188#sending-email-reports-scholarship-growth-enterprise
Fathom
Fathom supports email reports:
https://usefathom.com/support/email-reports
Simple Analytics
You can switch on a weekly report in account settings:
https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/email-reports
Plausible
"In the account settings you can select weekly (every Monday) and/or monthly (every 1st of the month) email reports too. You can set them to be automatically sent to yourself only but you can also add anyone else to the distribution list."
Thanks to @markosaric for the comment clarifying the option in Plausible
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I've been doing billion-dollar analytics for e-commerce giants like PlayStation and Rakuten since 2012. I'm also writing a book (it's almost finished!), called Analytics for Indies, that takes you 0-to-100 in analytics.
If you find this post useful, you'll find the book about 10 times more so. Want to be notified when it's out? You can get notified here.
So true! In Plausible Analytics in the account settings you can select weekly (every Monday) and/or monthly (every 1st of the month) email reports too. You can set them to be automatically sent to yourself only but you can also add anyone else to the distribution list.
Thank you @markosaric! Editing the post to reflect this.
you're welcome!
Thanks Blake! ⚡️ great information and resources. I used the template for all my properties in GA 🎉 at last I've proper a dashboard. Will you write about Google Data Studio?
Thank you for the kind words!
As for Google Data Studio, I can think of a couple other tools that I would expect to have wider acceptance for doing the job of visualizing and reporting data from multiple sources. Domo and Tableau come to mind. Tableau has no free tier but has mass acceptance in industry, across sectors. Domo has a free tier and also has wide acceptance.
In terms of making great dashboards, these tools shine best when you have multiple sources of data that you want to report together: say, your web analytics data and from your backend database and Stripe.
Definitely on the table to be a topic in future writing!
Thanks for the dashboard template. I imported it in my GA view of my website traffic.
One important thing that I could not figure out how to do with GA is the following:
If you notice a drop or a rise in traffic, how to you understand why you have this change in traffic? e.g.
Is it because of a new referrer?
Is it because a new web content is picking traffic?
Is it from an email campaign?
In GA, there is no standard or custom report that could automatically scan all the reasons for a change in the traffic and reveal the (major) reason behind it. Am I correct?
Fyi, I am using GA as the reporting backend for my SoftMeter application analytics library (for desktop software). https://www.starmessagesoftware.com/softmeter
If you apply analytics solutions to also desktop software (not only websites), I would be very interested in hearing your feedback about my library.
One shouldn't rely on a single dashboard (or single report) to answer all questions. Think of it as a 2-step process:
GA specifically has a glaring weakness around the report you would want to look at in your scenario, which is a grouped line chart displaying traffic by channel. The data is there, it's just hard to get at. You can get a rough indicator in the Insights tab (right rail) if you ask it "Trends for Default Channel Grouping". Definitely not an ideal arrangement, and almost every tool does this better.
Clever! I install analytics in PlayStation consoles in my day job, so I have a deep appreciation for what SoftMeter does. It hadn't occurred to me to just wrap GA like that and get the underlying infra for free. Nicely done. How's business?
Thanks for the encouraging feedback on SoftMeter.
Business is not going as good as I would expect, concerning the paid customers.
The library is heavily used on 500'000+ active installations (on end-user machines), but this high figure is mostly due to free software applications that have a bigger user base than paid software has.
I have only a few development houses who are paying for the PRO edition.
Maybe because SoftMeter was designed as a zero-cost solution (benefiting from the free infrastructure) it does not attract the developers who have their wallet out of their pockets?
Thanks for sharing! Wish I knew about this before, definitely bookmarking for future use :)