Hello and welcome. I'm Chris Planeta and I'm a host of Growth Detectives show. This is our fourth episode to date. In this episode, we are talking about making web analytics reports dashboard - a dashboard that will let you see how your company or how your business, how your website is doing and how it will be doing in the near future.

To create such report we need to start with the quality of traffic sources that you need to have, a number of active users that you are getting from each traffic source. And what I mean by active users? An active user is not a person who comes to your website and leaves 10 seconds later.

It is a person who spends there some time, for example, a minute. It is a person who views a few pages. It's a person who scrolls your website and clicks some buttons, makes some actions that can tell you that this person actually likes what they are seeing. They are interested in the content of your website.

And if you have these numbers of active users that you're getting from different traffic sources, then you can compare them to the cost of their acquisition. And this will tell you how much it costs you to get an active user.

It will be also a number that you will be able to improve in the future to lower the cost and to increase the number of the number of users you are getting.

But this is step one, but there are also other things that you should put in your analytics dashboard.

Next things you should put are actually data of how many people you have on each step of your customer journey. So for example, if you have a web store, you could put their information, how many people are interested in your products, how many people added something to cart, how many people started checkout and checked out and made a purchase.

Some of this data is very easy to get some, some of it can be more difficult. So you need to set up some some custom segments in your analytics tools.

However, it is all achievable and when you get those numbers, you can put them in your analytics reports and turn them into a funnel, which will show you not only how many people there are in numbers like 300, 400, et cetera, but also how many people drop off on every stage. For example, out of a thousand active users, I'm getting only 300 people who are interested in specific products, only a hundred people who added something to cart, only 50 people who started checkout, things like that.

And yeah, and actually this is it.

You don't need anything more to know how your website is performing and how it will perform in the future, or actually how your business will perform in the future. Because if you know your conversion rate, which is like 2%, for example, from the number of active users to the purchase, then you can easily say that, okay, so now I have like a thousand active users. The conversion path takes about a week and the conversion is 2%. So in a week, 2 percent of those thousand users will probably buy something from me. So this is something important, something that will let you plan for the future.

And also all these numbers you are getting, even though they are very simple, they will also act as something to improve on, because you will be able to improve the number of people you have on each stage and also increase the percentage of people that move from one stage to another one.

And yes, and this is everything you need to have great web analytics reports dashboard. And for those of you who are more into web analytics, who are professional marketers and are wondering "Hey, why there isn't anything about attribution conversion or attribution modeling" I will actually record another episode of this podcast. It should be out tomorrow or in two days and I will tell you there why I think attribution modeling does more harm than good and it shouldn't be used at all, actually, and especially not in your web analytics reports.

Thank you.

​