Streamlining Data into a Single User-Friendly Interface

Jason Brewster - March 24, 2016

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that makes almost every aspect of a user’s journey available. This is its value proposition, but it’s also one of its handicaps. Few employees in any organization have extensive training for Google Analytics, so finding the exact data to answer their everyday questions becomes vital.

Not every stakeholder needs to know everything. Typically they’re only concerned with their own business unit. For these opportunities there are a few different solutions.

Google Analytics Dashboards

Cost: Free
Platform: Cloud

Google Analytics Dashboards are simple, and present the data based on however you can filter and segment it. Meaning that you cannot add or remove quantities arbitrarily.

You can add up to 12 widgets per dashboard, and the widgets can link directly to a full report. These dashboards can use complex filters to zero in on specific slices of traffic.

Dashboards can be shared with other users or sent in scheduled emails.

To find examples of great dashboards, google offers a solutions gallery:
https://www.google.com/analytics/gallery/#landing/start/

Tableau Desktop

Cost: $999 – $1,999 per user
Platform: Desktop Application

Tableau is a hugely popular dashboarding program. It is excellent at merging multiple data sources into beautiful dashboards in an efficient manner.

Below is a list of the benefits of Tableau Desktop:

1. It’s fast. They claim to be 10-100x faster than existing solutions.
2. It can connect to a spreadsheet, SQL database, Hadoop, or cloud sources. Additionally there are several connectors to services like the Google Analytics Core Reporting API.
3. It has an intuitive drag and drop interface that makes data manipulation very easy.
4. It allows for dashboards with multiple pages and quick filters that let the end user interact with your data sets.
5. It has analytics features that help determine trends through descriptive stats and correlation.
6. It is a powerful tool for blending data.

You can try it for 14 days, free, at the below link:
http://www.tableau.com/products/desktop/download

Google Data Studio 360 (Closed Beta)

If you are interested in only the newest and shiniest products, the Google Analytics team has you covered.

Not much is yet known about this upcoming contender, but it should have similar capabilities to make use of multiple data sources to produce dashboards that can be shared across organizations easily.

Learn more about this upcoming product below:
https://www.google.com/analytics/360-suite/data-studio/