A simple SEO dashboard in Data Studio – the case of a stock photo website

Monitoring SEO performance

A lot of monitoring for SEO can be done using Google Analytics and Google Search Console data. Other tools may be used as well, however for the purpose of this article we will line out an example with Google Analytics and Google Search Console data.

In Google Analytics, the landing page report for organic traffic is an important report, where the number of sessions, metrics regarding user behavior within the website, and conversion metrics may be viewed. A page that has high traffic but also a high bounce rate on an ecommerce website, such as PIXTA, may mean that, for example, users are having trouble finding the products which they were looking for. If this were the case, improving which products are shown and how they are shown on the first page may decrease the bounce rate and eventually increase the possibility of conversion.

Monitoring allows us to find issues as in the examples above, make website improvements, and measure the outcome.

Preparation for monitoring: Filtering and Grouping

In order to make sense of the data, especially for large websites like PIXTA which have a very high page count, it becomes necessary to group or filter the data.
For example, if we just look at the pages by traffic, we will have the top page, popular category pages, popular tags or blog pages, all of which perform a different role and answer to different user needs, and it may not make much sense to compare between these pages.

Therefore, we would first want to group pages by their functionality. The grouping would depend on your website, but in a case of an ecommerce website, we may for example group category pages, tag pages, product pages, blog pages, etc.

Problems in monitoring Google Search Console and Google Analytics data, and how to solve them with Data Studio

1. Filtering and grouping difficulties

In case of PIXTA, pages related to photographs always include “/photo” in the URL, illustrations include “/illustration” and videos － “/footage”, so it is very easy to filter for each of these URLs both in Google Analytics and Search Console.

However, in Search Console, there are scenarios when filtering is not possible. For example, if we want to compare the performance of the top pages for each of these product categories, there isn’t a way to use regular expressions or multiple rules at the same time, so easy comparison in the user interface is not possible.

Further, if we want to see all category data, in case of PIXTA there are 3 layers of categories, with the URL rules for the lower 3rd level being “/c{categoryID}/ c{categoryID}/ c{categoryID}” with hundreds of category IDs existing. As we cannot use regular expressions, we cannot view multiple or all category data at once.

In Data Studio, you can use both multiple AND or OR rules, and regular expressions, so filtering Search Console data is an easy task.

Further, you can also use Google Analytics segments on Google Analytics data within Data Studio, as well as Data Studio filters, which filter data on a hit level, something that segments cannot do.

How to create an SEO dashboard with Data Studio

Here I outline the creation of an SEO dashboard with Data Studio with the example of the report we created for monthly monitoring meetings for PIXTA team members.

First, we wanted to have an overview of the overall organic traffic to the website, therefore we displayes the overall organic user and session numbers from Google analytics, as well as impressions, clicks, click rate and average position from Search console. We added a time comparison to previous period to be able to spot any changes to our core metrics with one look.

For sites with strong seasonal trends, like PIXTA, it is helpful to have a YOY comparison, therefore we added a graph of organic sessions in the current year as compared to previous year.

Following, we added query and landing page data from Search Console, and landing page data from Google Analytics. Further, to evaluate page groups by functionality and product type, we had set up content groups in Google Analytics, and added these to the Data Studio report.

*in Data Studio, we can easily filter out the “(not set)” data, however we are leaving this in to see how the pages not grouped in any of our preset groups perform.

For these summary pages, we are using the Google Analytics’ organic traffic segment, and adding a filter control to filter data by device or source. PIXTA also have a member type custom dimension to differentiate regular users from creators, so we have also included it.
*Filter controls are specific to a data source, so we had to add two device filter controls － one for Search Console and one for Google Analytics data.

After looking at the overall performance of the website, we are ready to dive into performance by page type. We have created similar pages to report on each page group, including metrics we are most interested in seeing. We added one page each for photography, illustration and footage pages, as well as one page each for page genres (category, tag, product pages).

For each of these, we added a graph of organic sessions for the past 30 days, and session, user, impression, click and click rate score cards with a comparison to previous period.

We also added tables including Search Console data and Google Analytics data by landing page, also including transactions and revenue.

For these pages, we have added segments for organic traffic to the landing pages of interest in the Google Analytics interface, and have subsequently linked these to Data Studio to use on the Google Analytics data. For Search Console data, we used regular expression filters in Data Studio to limit data to the pages of interest.

This dashboard is very simple, but it allows us to view and share important data quickly, without the need to switch between interfaces and reports.
First, it allows us to see the overall performance and changes in trends, then it shows us main metrics by page type and allows us to find potential issues. When we find data that needs more exploration, we could then move to the necessary Google Analytics or Search Console reports to perform analysis on it.

Problematic points of a Data Studio report

There are many merits in using Data Studio, but there are also some things that should be kept in mind. Below are some of the important points we must take into consideration when creating an SEO dashboard.

Our customers’ thoughts after having used the Data Studio dashboard

The PIXTA team members have started using the dashboard, and these were their thoughts.

Having joined Google Analytics and Search Console, it looks like understanding trends will become faster, and everyday monitoring – smoother.

I used to pull and process data every week, but having compiled metrics we usually look at in monitoring in one dashboard, it looks like reporting will become seamless.
By summarizing data by sections, looking at overall value, by directory, device or product type, it has become easier to pinpoint where changes are happening.

PIXTA is a multilingual website, and if we create one dashboard, by simply copying it we can easily create dashboards for the other language sites as well.
We can look at the trends on different language websites by looking at the same metrics.

-It’s easier to see data from GA and Search Console at once (reduces the time and effort to switch)
-Changing the time period for a graph is faster than GA!? It’s very quick.
-It’s easy to look at with data organized by pages .(No time and effort needed to switch metrics)

In everyday monitoring, it was extremely troublesome to extract and check SC and GA data. But now I’m surprised to see it possible to view all the data at once in one dashboard. I’m very happy!