Understand your Website Performance with our User Experience Dashboard

Get closer to your website data with our free reporting template from Aro Digital and Silverstripe.

When it comes to reporting and data visualisation, Google Data Studio is a must. Not only is Google constantly building loads of awesome connectors, and slick visuals, but there are heaps of guides, templates and a growing community to sink your teeth into.

At Aro, we build dashboards for everything... and I mean everything. From combining app, web and customer data, through to visualising our project management workflow and dart competitions.

To help you get started on your Google Data Studio journey we’ve distilled a whole bunch of reports into 3 easy to read pages that you can use for free.

This dashboard will help you answer some questions like:

1. How much traffic is coming to my website?
2. Which channels are they coming from?
3. How is my site speed performing?
4. Which devices and speed connections are being used to visit my site?
5. How fast are elements loading?
6. Which content is bringing users to my website and where are they from?

It should take you about 5 minutes to setup—from there you can manage access like you would for any other Google Doc.

Setting Up Your Dashboard

A) What you need to setup your dashboard

• A Google Analytics account - with enough data to satisfy your (or your stakeholders) appetite. Use the Google Merchandise Store Google Analytics demo account if you don’t have your own.

Get the Dashboard

B) Make A Copy

• Make a copy of our template dashboard by clicking on the two rectangles at the top right

C) Add Your Sources

• Add the Google Analytics source
• Add the Chrome User Report source - Search Chrome in the connector selector to find this. Then use your home page URL in the text field. You can leave unchecked: “Allow "Enter origin URL:" to be modified in reports”

What’s in the Google Data Studio report?

The report’s using the data from the Google Merchandise Store which has a demo Google Analytics account you can get access to.

There are three parts to this dashboard which we’ll walk through.

1. Performance - provides a general overview of your traffic on a monthly basis
2. User Experience - looks at technical site performance and load times
3. Content - explores the most popular content and landing pages

1. Performance

This page represents an overview of how your website is performing overall, how much traffic is coming to it, and where they are coming from. In simplest terms, it provides a quick glance on some key metrics that you can cast an eye over.

A spike in sessions? Let’s find out where that came from.

Site speed has hit the roof? What did we recently deploy?

Here’s some of the list of metrics this page covers:

• Users, Sessions & Page View
• Bounces, Bounce Rate & Average session time
• Avg. DCL time, Page load, and server response (incredibly important to keep tabs on these three)
• Breakdown of sessions by Channel and User Type
• Users by country

2. User Experience

We borrowed some charts from the Chrome UX user report for this page, which looks at two critical elements, First Contentful Paint and Dom Content Loaded. These are two very important metrics to determine how your site is performing and how long it takes to load content.

You can check out the Google CRUX dashboard for further inspiration.

Grab a copy

Here’s some of the list of metrics this page covers:

• First Contentful Paint (fast, average, slow)
• DOM Content Loaded (essential to how fast your website loads)
• Connection type by cellular speed
• Usage by device type

3. Content

This page helps you look at what content users are resonating with the most, and what parts of your site are most explored. The ‘landing page’ report gives you a breakdown of which content is bringing users to your site, and what is their level of interaction from there.

Bonus
All of the charts are filters as well, so clicking on a particular segment will update the whole page and let you dig even deeper.

Here’s some of the list of metrics this page covers:

• Page path performance - by Sessions, Session Time and Bounce Rate
• Page analysis - what are the most frequent pages that users are bouncing from?
• Landing page performance - what pages are users landing on and how long are they staying on the website?

With pretty much unlimited possibilities and visualisations, we’re keen to keep adding to this template so put a comment below on what you’d like to see and we’ll add it in.

If you’re loving the dashboard - feel free to share this blog in your dev or marketing communities!