What is a website dashboard?
A website dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Analytics, Search Console, server logs) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g. page views, bounce rate, session duration), enabling teams to monitor website performance and create presentations for stakeholders.
Website dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a website dashboard?
An actionable website dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive website dashboards
Executive dashboards for CTOs, CEOs, and clients show the website's impact on business goals. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Website traffic analysis: by source, using attribution models for large-scale websites.
- User behavior analysis: session duration, bounce rate, pages per session
- Cohort analysis: user retention and engagement by cohort (sign-up period, traffic source)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Website manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-source views with drill-downs to see performance by page, region, device, and traffic source. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-source reporting: overall website performance across different traffic sources
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for benchmarking website performance
- Content and audience research
Operational Website Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and web managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- SEO: keyword rankings, impressions, clicks, site speed, errors, backlinks
- Performance: page load times, server response times, uptime
- User engagement: click paths, heatmaps, scroll depth
Operational website dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a website dashboard?
To build a website dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are Google Analytics for web analytics, Search Console for SEO data, and server logs for performance metrics.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of website dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like traffic monitoring, SEO performance, and user engagement.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom events, user data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "goals" and "conversions".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your website reporting use cases, such as traffic monitoring, SEO performance, and user engagement.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Page views, bounce rate, session duration, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, page, device, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your website dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your website dashboards:
Share
Share your website dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a website dashboard?
Website dashboards should include a mix of traffic, engagement, conversion, and performance metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of the website towards business goals. They include:
Website traffic KPIs measure the flow of visitors to the site:
- Traffic metrics: page views, sessions, unique visitors
- Engagement metrics: bounce rate, average session duration, pages per session
- Conversion metrics: goal completions, conversion rate, key events
Performance KPIs compare your website's technical efficiency, including:
- Speed: page load time, server response time
- Reliability: uptime, error rates
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Traffic: new vs returning visitors
- Engagement: user flow, heatmaps
- Conversion: conversion rate by source
To analyze these website KPIs, segment them by:
- Source: organic, direct, referral, social
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Page: landing page, exit page
- Device: desktop, mobile, tablet
- Content: page type, topic
