Dashboard - Google Analytics for iPad and iPhone

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

"You can't improve what you don't measure." These words are usually attributed to the prominent American mathematician and statistician William Deming. I think this opinion is fully shared by the site owners. A couple of days ago we talked about the Analytiks application. With it, you can track attendance using your iPhone. After the publication, several letters came in which they asked to write about similar applications for the iPad. Well, let's continue the topic.

Dashboard is a client for Google Analytics. The program is universal, adapted to work on iPhone and iPad. Supports 2-step authentication, so you can not provide data to your entire Google account, but generate a password specifically for Dashboard.

Unlike Analytiks, Dashboard does not impose hard restrictions on the number of sites. Let me remind you that Analytiks has a strict limit of no more than five.

The Dashboard interface is neither beautiful nor user-friendly. There is even a small "entry" threshold. To fully master the application, you will have to read about a dozen help articles that are available in the application itself.

The main screen displays 5 indicators: the number of visits, visitors, viewed pages, successful conversions and the Performance Index. The program provides slightly more data than Analytiks. The ability to track targets is a definite plus.

In one tap, you can switch from statistics for a day to data for a week or a month.

Next to each indicator (for example, the number of viewed pages), the developer has derived two more metrics. One shows how much has changed the efficiency of the site in comparison with the previous period. At the same time, the attendance achieved during the current period of time is compared with the entire previous period (for example, the traffic for the first 10 hours of the current day, the program will compare with 24 hours of the previous day). The decision is wrong. You don't know how successful the site is now. You cannot decide whether to publish more materials or not.

Dashboard allows you to set key performance indicators (KPI). For example, if your site is visited by 1000 people a day, and you are aiming for 1500, you can choose this number as such an indicator. The second metric is the target. The program tells you how far you fall short of the specified indicator (or how much you have exceeded it, it also happens). KPIs are set in the application itself; you do not need to set them in Google Anaytics.

The big drawback of Dashboard is poor data visualization. Either dry numbers or a simple graph are available to you. There are no pie, bar or 3D charts here. The program also does not provide data on traffic sources, geography of visits, browsers used.

The author of the Dashboard introduced another indicator of website performance - the Performance Index. The closest analogue, the developer claims, is stock indices. The site is assigned a conditional index - 1000, which changes over time (like the indicators of exchanges). The Performance Index is based on traffic indicators and their weight. The formula is as follows (the picture is clickable):

In my opinion, the Performance Index is a synthetic, absolutely unnecessary indicator.

The iPad version looks like just a stretched counterpart of the iPhone sibling. The interface has a lot of empty spaces in which to place useful information. The basic version of the Dashboard is distributed free on the App Store. The Pro version allows you to track the goals set in Google Analytics (Goals). They ask for $ 4.99 for it.