Creating Custom Dashboards
To create a custom dashboard, complete the following steps: From a default or custom dashboard, click the New Dashboard icon to open an empty dashboard. To add visualizations to this dashboard, complete the following steps: Click the Choose from existing visualizations link in the dashboard. Or, click the Add Visualization icon. To top the overall dashboard design off, we recommend to create a custom slicer design as the default slicer designs just look old-fashioned and would destroy the whole dashboard appearance. In episode 3 of this tutorial series, we will go into detail on how to create modern slicer designs with beautiful hover effect and button states that.
Everyone knows that Google Analytics is the top software to use when it comes to tracking your web marketing performance and traffic quality but not many people are utilizing all of the features it has to offer to their fullest potential. One particular feature that I feel is underutilized would be the custom reporting dashboards. I have been using them a LOT lately for our clients and it really adds a tremendous amount of value to our clients. With minimal experience, our clients can log into Google Analytics to see data directly related to the efforts that we put forth towards their marketing campaign whether its PPC conversions, SEO conversions, traffic etc. As I always say, an SEO is only as good as the tools he or she knows how to use so I feel that writing about dashboards will help any SEO that reads this post. Of course you can take things to the next level after reading this post by using advanced dashboards that include many regex filters and event labels but this post is actually intended for the “custom dashboard rookie” to learn how to do basic things like track certain landing pages or conversions from certain mediums/sources.
What is a reporting dashboard?
First of all, for those of you who have no idea what a custom dashboard is, simply log into your Google Analytics account and click on the Left Navigation button that reads “Dashboards”. A dashboard is a go-to place to see the data that matters most to you. If you don’t have any dashboards, you can click on “+New Dashboard” and you can either start with a blank canvas, a starter template or dashboard from the gallery by clicking on the “import from gallery” button as shown on the image to the left. I encourage you to take a look at the gallery to see the many pre-built dashboards that were designed by internet marketing Guru’s throughout the world. Google does a good job at only sharing really well put together templates in the gallery so don’t worry about finding dashboard templates that might be faulty. They all seem to work pretty darn well from my experience. Below is a screen shot of the gallery screen that allows you to perform searches for dashboards with filters and using categories or even search query.
The starter Dashboard is very basic and I don’t recommend using that option. Especially if you are trying to show your client value by making a custom reporting dashboard, this starter dashboard is really not custom at all and shows data that in my opinion is not that important. The start dashboard shows things like what locations are being used to find you on a map, the top browsers used by your visitors and the total number of new visits vs returning visitors. I really feel that the starter dashboard is there to show people what a dashboard is all about and to allow you to modify existing widgets with something to already work with.
Creating widgets to track segmented data
Typically form submissions and traffic are enough to measure so today I would like to explain how you can setup a dashboard to show only the data pertaining to these three things. Assuming that you or your client is interested in tracking form submissions and attributing them to either organic or PPC visitors, you may way to create widgets to show these data points in one easy to find place. For this example I am going to start with a blank canvas and my first widget is going to be used to track form submissions from PPC traffic only. To do this, you will need to either have an event that tracks form submissions or a thank you page which a visitor is directed to after filling out the form on your website that you want to track. So lets begin, first you can create a widget (click on + Widget on the top left side of the page). To the left is an example of what the widget settings window looks like. You will need to first name the widget, lets give it an appropriate naming convention like “PPC form submissions” or something similar.
I would recommend using the standard table report so you can have a clean table showing the number of PPC form submissions. To complete this, you will need to display the following columns. The first column selection which is in green as shown in the above screen shot needs to be set to “page” and the next column should show page views so that we can see the number of times the thank you page was viewed (choose unique page views as the third column to see how many unique form submissions occurred). The next thing you are going to want to do is apply a few filters. The first filter should be a “Only Show” filter which uses “Page” as the dimension and you need to set it to match a page containing or exactly matching the thank you page URL parameter which in this case is “/contact_form/contract-pan…..”. This is basically telling Google that you only want to see the number of page views for your thank you page that a visitor is directed to after filling out a form.
Last but not least, you will need to apply a second filter to only include organic traffic. To do so, click on “add a filter” then select “medium” as the dimension followed by exactly matching “cpc” as the field option. This is basically telling Google to only show you the number of form submissions that were generated from pay per click traffic. Below is a close up of the filter patterns that were explained.
Tracking SEO performance with custom dashboards
Assuming that you are either an SEO offering marketing services or a client paying for SEO services you should want to track the keywords and pages you are promoting. With dashboards, you can literally track the pages that you optimizing (or that your SEO company is optimizing) to see how many visitors are finding your landing pages via the keywords that you are optimizing your site for (or paying an SEO company to optimize your site for). I will explain how this can be done.
Lets say for example, you want to target one of your product specific pages that belong to your eCommerce website. We have a a lot of clients that hired us as an e-commerce seo company to help promote a few dozen product pages to the top of the SERP’s and we create dashboards that show the number of organic visits that page is getting and the keywords used to find that page. First we will need to create a widget that shows keyword data. So click on “+ Widget” and then choose the standard table report again. Next you will want to name the widget, and select the primary dimension which will be “keyword” in this case. You can select any two metrics that you want to use but I typically use new visits and visits to see how many new visits I am getting compared to repeat visits.
Next comes the filters, since you want to see only the traffic finding your page organically, you will need a filter to specify the page and a filter to specify the medium. So we create two just like before, one for the page that you want to track by selecting “landing page” (landing page as opposed to just “page” because we need to ensure that this page was used as an entry path organically) as the dimension and one for organic by selecting “medium” as the dimension and matching it to “organic”. Below is what the filter pattern should look like for the to “only show” filters.
Tracking keywords and landing pages in one widget
If you want to only show the visits you are getting to that particular page but you only want to show the number of visitors that found the using a list of target keywords that you are targeting you can do so pretty easily. You will need to just add a third filter which specifies which keywords to use as a “only show” filter. You will probably want to use “match regex” as your match option so that you can include many keywords in one filter. Simply separate each keyword with a line break “|” and surround the keyword list in a set of parenthesis. If you have a lot of keyword and you feel its going to take too long to manually enter each keyword I recommend you read my blog post which explains how to do this using excel formulas. I wrote a blog post a while back that shows exactly how to use Regex filters for this scenario which I encourage you to read too.
All in all, I think that this is a great place to start when it comes to creating custom dashboards. I encourage everyone to comment and ask questions about my methods and to share more advanced custom dashboard tips too! Thanks for reading!
About The Author
-->Dashboards are a focused and organized view of your cloud resources in the Azure portal. Use dashboards as a workspace where you can quickly launch tasks for day-to-day operations and monitor resources. Build custom dashboards based on projects, tasks, or user roles, for example.
The Azure portal provides a default dashboard as a starting point. You can edit the default dashboard. Create and customize additional dashboards, and publish and share dashboards to make them available to other users. This article describes how to create a new dashboard, customize the interface, and publish and share dashboards.
Create a new dashboard
In this example, we create a new, private dashboard and assign a name. Follow these steps to get started:
Sign in to the Azure portal.
From the Azure portal menu, select Dashboard. Your default view might already be set to dashboard.
Select New dashboard.
This action opens the Tile Gallery, from which you'll select tiles, and an empty grid where you'll arrange the tiles.
Select the My Dashboard text in the dashboard label and enter a name that will help you easily identify the custom dashboard.
Select Done customizing in the page header to exit edit mode.
The dashboard view now shows your new dashboard. Select the arrow next to the dashboard name to see dashboards available to you. The list might include dashboards that other users have created and shared.
Edit a dashboard
Now, let's edit the dashboard to add, resize, and arrange tiles that represent your Azure resources.
Add tiles from the dashboard
To add tiles to a dashboard, follow these steps:
Select Edit from the page header.
Browse the Tile Gallery or use the search field to find the tile you want.
Select Add to add the tile to the dashboard with a default size and location. Or, drag the tile to the grid and place it where you want.
Creating Custom Dashboards In Servicenow
Tip
If you work with more than one organization, add the Organization identity tile to your dashboard to clearly show which organization the resources belong to.
Add tiles from a resource page
There is an alternative way to add tiles to your dashboard. Many resource pages include a pushpin icon in the command bar. If you select the icon, a tile representing the source page is pinned to the dashboard that is currently active.
Resize or rearrange tiles
To change the size of a tile or to rearrange the tiles on a dashboard, follow these steps:
Select Edit from the page header.
Select the context menu in the upper right corner of a tile. Then, choose a tile size. Tiles that support any size also include a 'handle' in the lower right corner that lets you drag the tile to the size you want.
Select a tile and drag it to a new location on the grid to arrange your dashboard.
Additional tile configuration
Some tiles might require more configuration to show the information you want. For example, the Metrics chart tile has to be set up to display a metric from Azure Monitor. You can also customize tile data to override the dashboard's default time settings.
Create Custom Dashboards
Any tile that needs to be set up displays a Configure tile banner until you customize the tile. To customize the tile:
Select Done customizing in the page header to exit edit mode.
Select the banner, then do the required setup.
Note
A markdown tile lets you display custom, static content on your dashboard. This could be basic instructions, an image, a set of hyperlinks, or even contact information. For more information about using a markdown tile, see Use a markdown tile on Azure dashboards to show custom content.
Customize tile data
Data on the dashboard automatically shows activity for the past 24 hours. To show a different time span for just this tile, follow these steps:
Select Customize tile data from the context menu or the filter from the upper left corner of the tile.
Select the checkbox to Override the dashboard time settings at the tile level.
Choose the time span to show for this tile. You can choose from the past 30 minutes to the past 30 days or define a custom range.
Choose the time granularity to display. You can show anywhere from one-minute increments to one-month.
Select Apply.
Delete a tile
To remove a tile from a dashboard, follow these steps:
Select the context menu in the upper right corner of the tile, then select Remove from dashboard. Or,
Select Edit to enter customization mode. Hover in the upper right corner of the tile, then select the delete icon to remove the tile from the dashboard.
Clone a dashboard
To use an existing dashboard as a template for a new dashboard, follow these steps:
Make sure that the dashboard view is showing the dashboard that you want to copy.
In the page header, select Clone.
A copy of the dashboard, named Clone ofyour dashboard name opens in edit mode. Use the preceding steps in this article to rename and customize the dashboard.
Publish and share a dashboard
When you create a dashboard, it's private by default, which means you're the only one who can see it. To make dashboards available to others, you can publish and share them. For more information, see Share Azure dashboards by using Azure role-based access control.
Open a shared dashboard
To find and open a shared dashboard, follow these steps:
Create Custom Dashboard In Azure
Select the arrow next to the dashboard name.
Select from the displayed list of dashboards. If the dashboard you want to open isn't listed:
select Browse all dashboards.
In the Type field, select Shared dashboards.
Select one or more subscriptions. You can also enter text to filter dashboards by name.
Select a dashboard from the list of shared dashboards.
Delete a dashboard
To permanently delete a private or shared dashboard, follow these steps:
Select the dashboard you want to delete from the list next to the dashboard name.
Select Delete from the page header.
For a private dashboard, select OK on the confirmation dialog to remove the dashboard. For a shared dashboard, on the confirmation dialog, select the checkbox to confirm that the published dashboard will no longer be viewable by others. Then, select OK.
Next steps