The Ultimate Blogging Dashboard on Google Analytics

1. How many readers your blog has
2. Your most popular posts
3. Where your readers are
4. Where your readers come from
5. Mobile and Non Mobile

Creating a new dashboard

1. Once you’re logged into Google Analytics and selected the profile you’re working on, click on +New Dashboard in the left hand navigation
2. Give the new dashboard a name, select Blank Canvas and click Create Dashboard.
3. This takes us straight to the Add a Widget page so let’s make our first widget which will show us how many readers your blog has.
4. The metric we’re interested in here is unique visitors. Give your new widget a title like ‘How many readers your blog has’ and make sure that ‘Metric’ is selected under ‘Standard’. Now we choose the metric we want to show, in this case ‘Unique Visitors’ and click save.

How many readers your blog has

1. The metric we’re interested in here is unique visitors. Give your new widget a title like ‘How many readers your blog has’ and make sure that ‘Metric’ is selected under ‘Standard’. Now we choose the metric we want to show, in this case ‘Unique Visitors’ and click save.
2. Once you’ve done this, you’ll see your new dashboard with your very first widget.

How to change the layout of your dashboard

1. By default your new dashboard has 3 columns. Try dragging your new widget to the middle column and you’ll see it stick there.
2. If you want to change the number of columns your dashboard has, click the ‘Customise Dashboard’ link at the top right of the page.
3. There are various options you can choose from here but we’ll stick with the 30-40-30 split for now so just go ahead and click Save.

Your most popular posts

1. At this stage you should have 1 widget in the middle column of your dashboard. Let’s go ahead and make the next widget which will show your blog’s most popular posts.
2. Click the ‘+ Add Widget’ button at the top left of the page, give it a name and click ‘Table’
3. What we’re interested in here is the number of unique visitors to a page so select ‘Page’ as the dimension and ‘Unique Visitors’ as the metric. You can also choose how many pages you want to see. We’ll leave this at 10 for now so go ahead and click ‘Save’.
4. All being well you’ll see your new Most Popular Posts widget in your dashboard. Let’s move it to the middle column so it sits under our first widget.

Where your readers are

1. You should be getting familiar with this now so go ahead and click ‘+ Add Widget’, give it a name and click ‘Table’.
2. We want to show the country and the number of unique visitors but it might also be useful to show how many pages per visit for each country.
3. Select ‘Country/Territory’ for the dimension, ‘Unique Visitors’ for the first metric and ‘Pages / Visit’ for the second metric. This will give us an extra column in the widget.
4. Click Save and move the widget over to the right hand column.
5. 

Where your readers come from

1. Here we want to show our traffic sources so after giving your new widget a name, click ‘Table’ and select ‘Source’ as the dimension and ‘Unique Visitors’ as the metric.
2. Let’s leave this widget in the left hand column. 
3. 

Mobile and Non Mobile

1. Go through the usual steps of adding and naming your new widget, click ‘Table’, add ‘Mobile (Including Tablet) as the dimension, ‘Unique Visitors’ as the first metric and ‘Bounce Rate’ as the second metric. This is useful to see how bounce rates compare between mobile and non-mobile traffic.

1. Click save and there you can see your final widget.
2.