KPI or key performance indicators are the measurable value of an organization or individual that how they are achieving business objectives.

Google analytics can be used to measure the KPI’s mainly by setting up a custom Google Analytics dashboard and Goals.

The main purpose of KPI is to drive specific action that results in data-driven decisions to your website.

There are different metrics to measure KPI

Let’s start.

If you don’t have a google analytics account lets sign up for free. Connect your blog or even a test website to Google Analytics.

Set up Custom Google Analytics dashboard

First, think about your KPI requirements and identify a predefined dashboard which will display the data.

Select your google analytics account and click on customization tab.

Select Dashboard from that list and click create.

Name the dashboard according to your desire and click on import from the gallery.

Now we can see dashboards that can be filtered by category, select the category on the left side that aligns with our KPI.

For eg: I select content analysis dashboard and click on import and select create.

The new dashboard will displays all our website data.

Analysis the data and check whether what is useful for you and your company purpose.

Mixed Google Analytics dashboard

Lets create a mixed dashboard which contains different types of metrics.

Go to the dashboard section under customization and create a new dashboard. Name it.

Now add various widgets for the dashboard.

Give a new title to the widget.

After filling and selecting the necessary metrics, click save and that widget will be displayed on your dashboard.

Add widgets to the dashboard one by one.

What we do here is creating a dashboard specifically for your needs.

The actionable data from this report can help me to decide how the weekly SEO efforts can be improved to attract more new users, or which cities we need to increase our sales efforts in, or even which cities perform well that we can learn from.

Compare the date ranges to give a new dimension to the analysis of data.

Set up goals

By setting up a goal, we indicate to Analytics that certain actions need to be measured and that it has a certain value, all which should be measured.

First go to the admin tab in google analytics and click goals in view section.

Add new goal.

Select the template that that will suite your goals for example contact form.

Click on continue.

Give a name to the goal.

Select the goal type.

For the contact form, most probable goal type will be the destination.

Click continue and specify the goal details.

Let’s say ”equal to” Contact and click on save.

Now the goal is available to use in Google Analytics

Measure KPI’s

Now in most cases, the dashboard provides only a brief overview and we would like to zoom in on historic KPI there to see how the business situation has changed over time and how trends are developing.

Select the date range first. So if I want to measure the KPIs over the past 12 months, I’m going to set the specific date range and click on apply.

Add new segments according to your wish and download it into a pdf format from the export option for further analysis.

How to measure content marketing KPI

So once you’re in Analytics, in the Behavior tab, scroll down to Site Content and then click on Landing Pages

If we want to see which has got the highest Bounce Rates we can select that metric.

Or, we can just start off by looking at the pages that’s got the most Sessions. Now if you’d like to go a step further to check the source of the traffic, you’re just gonna head over to the Secondary dimension here.

The report can be exported to an Excel or CSV file which will allow us to sort and filter the data further according to our needs.

Measuring a Brand related KPI

To produce the report, you will simply head over to the audience tab and click on overview

Now, since this is direct traffic, we select direct traffic, and we scroll to the bottom, and just click on apply, So this report is quite useful because we can view performance, both over a longer period of time and a shorter period of time.

Then see how the KPI status has changed over time.

Conclusion

Keeping up with actionable data in any business is great for decision making using the custom Google Analytics Dashboard and Goals  When you explore more options in Google Analytics, be sure to keep evaluating your list of KPIs.

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