Google Analytics Dashboards allow you to see several different important metrics at once in a specific profile. Depending on which metrics you are concerned with based on your prerogative (copywriting, SEO, paid search, etc.), you’ll be able to see several in one page that gives you a snapshot of “the big picture.”
Here’s an example of one (Note: URLs blacked out to protect the innocent. Heh!):
Instead of having to click through to several different standard reports to get all of this information, everything is on one page.
You can compare all of these metrics to each other in any date range you specify, which can be useful for spotting patterns or identifying the effects of any changes that are made such as a new blog post, site re-design, SEO recommendation implementations, and just about anything else.
Each of the boxes you see in this example is called a widget. These are custom made to measure a certain dimension such as a source, medium, or campaign by up to two metrics. There are four types of widgets:
We can use the previous screenshot to identify each type of widget as an example:
