Dashfolio

Do you use Google Analytics?  Certainly a lot of webmasters do and it gives a huge range of information.  Sometimes so much, it's hard to see the wood from the trees!

Over the last few weeks, we've been checking out a new service called Dashfolio.  It's aim is to provide a dashboard of for your Google Analytics stats.  

"But Google already does that", you might say.  And you'd be right, Google Analytics does have a dashboard, but this is a little different.  

It's more of an exception reporting dashboard, that gives you a heads-up on things that are most important - and that you might want to investigate further.

The weekly report

First off Dashfolio send you a weekly email that gives you key information you should be looking at.  For example, the email might show you your backlink performance for the past week:

The email will also show you your top visitor movers this past week and provide links to your dashboards and any alerts for any of the domains you are tracking.

The dashboard

When you get to the dashboard, you can immediately see your 6 month visitor performance and get a sense of the trend:

Then some short term, week-on-week comparisions showing what happened this week compared with last:

If you're using Twitter and Facebook, it can then tell you about activity/followers in these accounts.  

This is then followed by some SEO information, including backlinks added, PageRank and popular searches

It will then tell you 

• Malware checks.  Whether it's found any malware on the site.
• Broken links.  Links on your site that don't go anywhere.
• Domain renewal.  When the domain is up for renewal

Insights, Alerts and Reports

In addition to the Dashboard, there are other areas that provide useful information.

Insights

This is a list of what Dashfolio thought was interesting this week - a continuation of the information in the weekly email.  It might be things like:

• Visits are up/down this week
• There were 100 new backlinks this week
• You acquired another 5 Twitter followers this week
• This Thursday there were 65 visits, this is 45% above average for a Thursday

Alerts

Alerts are bad things that Dashfolio has found like

• Broken links
• Malware
• Couldn't reach home page

Reports

For any of the domains your are tracking, you can send a weekly report to any recipient.

Conclusion

All in all, Dashfolio is a great tool for monitoring your website from a greater height than Google Analytics (or any analytics software) because it is giving you an overall picture along with alerted detail.  You will still need Analytics to get into the nitty-gritty, but this gives you the pointers you need.

It's especially good if you're looking after many domains because it highlights the important things that are happening.  Could you miss something?  Probably, but this goes a long way to helping you gain focus on your stats.

To get started, just sign up and point it at your Google Analytics account.