The challenge of website analytics data

Anyone with a website should be tracking their traffic. It isn't hard to do, and it isn't expensive. Google Analytics offers their platform for free. It isn't a stripped down oversimplified tool. It is a full featured data analytics platform. As the head of the analytics team we used the paid version of Google Analytics and other than traffic volume limitations, support, and a few other geeky technology kinda things, the free version is the same. Now if you're getting more than 10 million hits per month or have an analytics team that is programming a hundred custom data points, then you will hopefully be able to afford Google Analytics Premium. For the rest of us... it is free and it is one of the best products on the market.

Here's the problem. With any complex and powerful tool, using it isn't very straight forward. When ever I help a client get their a digital product up and running, I make sure they have Google Analytics installed so they can track traffic/usage. Without exception, when they log in to Google Analytics, they have no idea what they are looking at. Now with a little training I can usually get them to  the point where they can find some useful information. Unfortunately the process is so cumbersome that they rarely, if ever, log back in. As an experiment, I had someone log into Google Analytics and do a little scavenger hunt to find the basic information. I didn't ask them to find anything complex. I just ask for simple items like "how many page views did you receive yesterday" or "how many users visited your site in the last 30 days". To get a collection of the basic information, enough to get a good understanding of the traffic to their website it took 45 clicks.  So rather than spent time regularly checking into their traffic, they rely on me to update them periodically ... which comes at a cost.

This is why Olive Branch Technology developed Dollar Dashboards. We first created these dashboards to automatically update our own clients about their traffic and now we're offering it to anyone. For just $1  per month (to cover our hosting costs) you can get your data delivered directly to via email and get access to an easy to read online dashboard.