Journey Begins

Once you start your own business or startup, the very first thing that comes to mind is “How many visitors did my website receive?”

Google Analytics provides tons of metrics and it becomes quite a chore to keep up with all the dashboard pages and filter options. As a small biz owner myself, I went through a phase where I ended up spending significant amount of time checking out Google Analytics

To save time and mental energy on a daily routine task, I asked “What are the most basic metrics I need to measure from Google Analytics?”

The answer pretty much came down as a need to have “one page dashboard that displays various metrics”.

But what metrics and how should I measure?

I needed something that I can setup once and just take a peek every day for 5 minutes and see if everything is business as usual.

I will go into the complete thought process, detailing the pain points, details of each metric and the reasoning behind the particular sytle of charts.

Let me first list down the pain points tracking my business traffic

1. We have multiple websites and before we moved to universal analytics it was quite a pain to login and keep switching profiles within GA.

2. I needed to know how many visits we received yesterday, total count for the past month and a simple way to compare against previous months.

3. The second metric I was keen on, directly relates to content management and the lead generation. “Organic searches” is very important for a small business to survive.

4. We do spend some amount on Adwords so it mattered to see how much of the daily budget is being utilized to generate the traffic.

5. The other important relevant metric is “session duration“. This would tell me if we are generating engaging content and users are staying longer.

6. Other important SEO metric is the bounce rate

Having listed the requirements, the next step was to collect the raw data from Google analytics into a MySQL database

The complete steps to configure raw data collection from GA is listed here so we are not going to produce them again.