Tableau Software : Build a custom web analytics dashboard with this quick guide

Our session, Advanced Website Analytics, focused on how two of Tableau marketers-Hannah, a Senior Analyst and Josh, an SEO specialist-addressed the need for a single source of truth in our web analytics at Tableau. Create a login on the TCLive website to listen to our presentation.

Over 50 percent of marketing departments use at least 10 tools, according to a Hubspot survey. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics Cloud, and Mixpanel may all be current sources of website traffic data, but they aren't the only ones. Marketers use a host of tools that include search engines, Google Adwords, social media platforms, email marketing programs, and over a dozen flavors of web content management systems (CMS). Each of these adds another chapter to the story of your site's web traffic and each has different KPIs. Interpreting all this data is difficult, not just for the individual contributors (ICs) reporting on their work, but for non-subject matter experts like CMOs, VPs, and board members who consume the reports. This means the IC's have to spend extra time typing out a synopsis of what's going on with the data and why. It's a hassle and, frankly, not the best use of time. We set out to create a reporting dashboard that was intuitive, regardless of who was using it, and that told the whole story of the website's traffic.

We ended up with a set of dashboards that drill down in detail from whole-site metrics, to categories, to pages. Each dashboard tracks business-level and detail-level KPI's in each viz. We created some custom metrics to simplify the visuals and get right to the heart of what's happening with our organic web traffic. It's a work in progress and we're sharing it with you as we go. Our dashboards have been exceptionally useful to us and we think they'll be useful to you as well.

This post will cover all the resources we used to create our custom web analytics dashboard.