Idea Validation: Real-time Google Analytics Dashboard
As an indie hacker, I use Google Analytics (GA) extensively to monitor the traffic of various products I have launched. It is an amazing free product that gives us most of the preliminary KPIs.
I am not very impressed with their realtime dashboard, so we thought, we could come up with the better dashboard.
Assumptions:
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SMEs and big companies have a company-wide dashboard in their lobby that shows the real-time users, their locations and similar KPIs. So, we thought creating a cool, useful dashboard will be really helpful for them.
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GA is a niche market, but the probability of getting paying users is more.
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GA is/will be used by present and potential makers as it is the go-to solution for Analytics. I know mixpanel is capturing some of the market shares, but it is more on cohort analysis. So most makers will have GA, in addition to that, they may have Mixpanel too.
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Their UI is kind of standardized now and don’t think they will be investing more on that as they are now concentrating more on Data Studio, their customizable dashboard platform.
Here is the initial sketch by @sureshmurali. Would love to know your thoughts.
Real time GA traffic is not very useful. What actions are you going to take based on the traffic?
And is the GA real time dashboard good enough?
Seems like a nice to have, not a need to have.
I was thinking the same. It is just nice to have.
Have you approached companies who have GA traffic that they're interested in monitoring? Is it a problem they are interested in paying for? How are they solving that problem now?
Are there companies that would NEED to monitor that data instead of just "having it in the lobby"?
Nope @arvidkahl Haven't approached any companies using GA. But I came across a lot of companies that display their KPIs in their lobby to create a sense of visibility and transparency.
https://www.geckoboard.com/ is one such company that specializes in creating a customized dashboard. It has got a lot of users and expensive from my perspective.
I have seen lot of products in the same domain(customized Dashboard) in producthunt that gained a good traction. Based on that, I am sure there are users and the problem actually exists.
But, I don't want to start with customized dashboards, just start with GA real-time.
Yeah, mostly all companies do that. They have a dedicated team that does analysis on data from GA.
Thanks @arvidkahl for showing up!
Thanks!
I understand that all companies who aggregate GA data eventually analyze it. Let me make my question more specific:
"Are companies who use GA in need of a realtime dashboard? Does the dashboard give them more insight than what they can extract through reports inside GA?"
I ask this because I worked for a company that had such a dashboard somewhere, but the real value of GA came not from that realtime dashboard but from intense drilling into the data inside the GA report views. The analysis did never really happen from the dashboard, but from experts looking into charts and tables, maybe even exporting them into Excel.
You ask the right question. I am sure this realtime dashboard will not be used for analysis. Here is my assumption, why a company might need realtime GA dashboard:
Really appreciate for taking time to ask the right questions.
"Yeah, mostly all companies do that. They have a dedicated team that does analysis on data from GA."
That's an incredibly wild assumption - most companies are a heck of a lot less sophisticated than you think, and having a dedicated team to look at GA data at most companies? Nah.
You are right. I should make less assumptions. Thank god, I evaluated the idea here
This dashboard will be powered by Google Analytics's API.