Dashboard Pro is the mobile app that I use daily to monitor statistical performance of both my own and my client’s websites. Connected to my Google Analytics account, it shows dashboard data for the most commonly sought questions: how many visitors today? Where are these visitors coming from? What articles and content are getting the most traffic right now?
Today, Digital Analytics, the makers of Dashboard Pro, have released Version 3.0 of the app and bring 80 new drilldown reports. Just as before, when you open the app, you will see all of the site profiles that you have set up within your Google Analytics account. Select one, and the initial display will show how many Visits, Visitors and Page Views your site has received today, with tabs for This Week and This Month. If you’ve set up Goals for your site, those will appear here as well.
Tap on Visits, and you will see a nice chart for your site’s Visits daily for the past month, followed by Countries, Returning, Sources and Content.
Drilldown Reports
Now, you can tap some of these charts to drill even further down into the data. For instance, tap on the one of the bar charts within Top Countries to get into an Audience report that includes Demographics, Behaviour, Technology, Mobile and Custom Variables, with each of these including multiple subcategories of reports to view.
Traffic Sources now includes drill downs for All Traffic, Direct, Referrals, Search, Campaigns, Social and AdWords. This is particularly useful for Search results analysis where you can better see traffic by search engine, and paid vs. organic keyword selections.
The Content Drilldown now includes reports on Site Content, Site Search and Events. This is where some of the best reports are now available. Here are four in particular that you should note:
- Pages shows the same information as the main graph – the top pages or content for your site for that period, but it doubles the amount shown from 5 to 10, which can really help savvy marketers. Any day that you’ve published one or more new pieces, it’s expected that those and the other most recent posts will be getting the most traffic, but what are some of the other Pages people are visiting?
- Content Drilldown is a very interesting report that provides metrics by URL, and includes subfolder designations. So, for instance, if all of your blog posts have a URL of /blog/title, then you may see /blog/ in this report if your posts are getting some attention. This is an interesting report because it will aggregate a lot of your content and perhaps show you some other areas of your site that are getting attention
- Exit Pages is particularly important. It’s great to get visitors to your site, but if they’re not looking at any other pages or content within your site, that’s not very effective. Exit Pages will help us see when users are reading one page and leaving, and remind us to look for ways to improve that Bounce Rate.
- Event Label is nestled within the Events reports, and helps us to see when visitors are clicking to open documents or open external sites. A quick glance at the Event Label report will show you specifically what files have been opened and what links were visited. This is a key report to keep in mind whenever you have a post that contains downloadable material, or key external links, like an affiliate link. ideal.
I was recently able to get a hold of Marco Hassler from the Digital Analytics team in Central Europe, and he had some very interesting comments on this update and their direction. He said that, “Version 3.0 was a big step for us towards our goal of being the most valuable Google Analytics iPhone app for business people. Still, we have many more ideas for what we could add to make the experience even better. We’ll start with adding some more reports and small features in the next minor release – and then focus our work on the next big step (that I can’t give away at the moment).”
With regard to the specifics of today’s update, Marco said that, “The reports that we added are most of the reports found in Google Analytics – also the structure is quite the same so that navigation should be easy. One small but very important feature is that reports are automatically segmented by the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that is selected on the dashboard. So, when selecting “Total Goal Conversions” on the dashboard for example, the drilldown reports show right away the best converting countries or the most converting content. That way you’re able to answer questions very quickly on the go – without creating or applying complex segments. Thanks to that the app is extremely powerful in a web analyst’s hand.”
Hassler went on to discuss their motivation for working these specific changes and features by saying, “The main idea of the app Dashboard Pro is having the most important KPIs of your website always with you – quick and real-time. Still, the customer feedback with version 2 was that more details were necessary to interpret KPIs and get answers on the go, without logging in to the Google Analytics website. This is why we were looking for a solution to combine the focus on KPIs with an in-depth analysis – without making the mistake to lose the focus on goals and conversions. With version 3 we enhanced the app with much more functionality, but still keeping it as simple and intuitive as before.”
The app is available in iTunes and the free version contains a limited report set.
Currently, Google does not offer their own mobile app for Google Analytics, and accessing Google Analytics via mobile browser is not ideal. Dashboard Pro is the best app I’ve found that offers quick access to my site metrics. If you have questions about Dashboard or Google Analytics, or if you’re using an app you think is even better, give a shout out in the comments below.
