Dashboard 11 – Sales Cockpit
This Google Analytics dashboard is perfect for
- Online retailers who need an overview of how their online business is performing.
This “Sales cockpit” answers following questions:
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Description of dashboard widgets
This widget shows you a simple count of how many unique visitors (i.e. different computers, tablets or smartphones) that paid a visit to your store.
You can see the widget settings below:
This pie chart show your two primary sources of net revenue (i.e. excluding taxes and shipping charges) . All other sources have been grouped into the “other” category.
This table shows you how many visits that each type of traffic has generated.
A wide range of traffic type can show up here.
Some of the more common ones are described below:
“organic” = free clicks from “natural” search resultats in Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc..
“direct” = typically people who know your website already and types the URL directly in the browser address field or has your site bookmarked from earlier visits.
“paid” = Google AdWords or similar types of traffic that have been tagged as paid traffic
“referral” = these visitors have found (and clicked on) a link to your online shop at another website
The column “Per visit value” tells you how much revenue that one visit from the related source give you on average.
This widget displays your conversion rate for the period in question.
Example: If you receive 100 visits (not unique visitors) to your website and 3 online orders are placed during those 100 visits, then your conversion rate is 3%.
This widget gives you a visual representation of your net revenue (i.e. gross revenue less shipping charges and taxes) and the total amount of visits to your website.
This widgets shows your top 10 best selling products and the related net revenue.
Plain and simple. Tells you how many orders that have been placed during the period in question.
This one shows you the average order value (calculation is based on gross revenue including shipping and tax)
Total gross revenue including shipping, local taxes and whatever charges that are applied to your customers’ shopping baskets during check-out.
This widget shows the net revenue during the selected period. It’s calculated as gross revenue less shipping fee, taxes and other charges.
This widget also shows net revenue, but this time ONLY revenue that are generated by customers who clicked on one of your AdWords ads.
This widget gives you highlights from your AdWords advertising.
It shows the net revenue and the amount of money that you paid to Google for having them run your ads.
If you want a more detailed look at your AdWords performance, then try out this AdWords dashboard.
Things to consider when looking at your data
Although a high number of visitors in itself is not an end goal, you still need traffic as a raw material for generating sales.
The number of orders shown in widget 7 (“How many orders”) is a direct product of the amount of visits (See widget 1 – “How many visitors?”) and your ability to turn those visits into orders (See widget 4 – “Percentage of visitors that placed an order”).
If you increase the amount of visitors by 20% (and your conversion rate remains unchanged) you get 20% more orders.
If you increase your conversion rate by 20% (not 20% percentage point, but from say 2,0% to 2,4%) and keep your amount of traffic stable, then you will likewise get 20% more orders.
If you increase both the amount of visitors AND your conversion rate by 20% each, then you will increase your sales by 44% – everything else equal.
Keep an eye at the average basket size as well (see widget 8 – “Average value”).
The equation for this dashboard looks something like this:
Amount of visits * Conversion rate (/100) * Average basket size = Gross revenue
When you have a clear picture of your overall figures, it’s time to start pinpointing the traffic sources and visitors that fill your pockets.
The widget 3 (“Traffic sources, # of visitors and average value”) shows not only the quantity of visitors brought in by each channel but also a “Per visit value”.
The “Per visit value” is the average revenue (gross revenue including shipping and taxes) that each visitor from the respective source gives you.
If you get 1,000 visits from “organic” (Google, Bing, etc) and those visits give you 10 orders with a total sales value of 500 USD, then the “Per visit value” for the organic source would be 50 cents per visit.
The “Per visit value” allows you to compare the quality of the traffic from each of the sources that drive traffic to your website.
Use the information when you decide where to focus your online marketing efforts. Direct your marketing spend towards the high value traffic sources.
Regardless of whether or not you are managing your AdWords campaigns yourself, you regularly need to keep an eye on your returns (ROI).
The widget 12 “AdWords campaigns with highest revenue – Top 5″ shows you the five AdWords campaigns that bring in the most revenue.
Even if your costs are zero (a sign that your AdWords ads have stopped not running) you can still have revenue attributed to AdWords advertising (the cookie usually has a duration of 30 days).
If you prefer to stay on top of your most expensive AdWords campaigns (rather than your best selling campaigns), go into the Widget settings and swap column 2 (Product revenue) with column 3 (Cost), then you will see the 5 campaigns that cost you the most to run.
If you have any questions or suggestions for improvements of either this guide or the dashboard itself, feel free to drop a comment below.
We have another dashboard in the pipeline which is also specifically targetted at B2B and B2C online stores. It will include tracking of conversion goals, such as newsletter sign-ups.
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This “Sales cockpit” is brought to you by Troels Kjems, a Google AdWords specialist and one of our dashboard pushers.
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