Monitor Several Google Analytics Accounts with TrakkBoard

As part of the online career that I’ve built over the past half decade, I am now responsible for tracking and analyzing Google Analytics data for multiple clients as well as for my own blogs and websites. Once you have four or five Google Analytics accounts that you want to keep an eye on and monitor every day, things can get a little bit difficult to manage. Multiple passwords aside, it can be a real hassle to log into each account and dig through the Google Analytics navigation menus to view one statistical graph at a time.

When you want to do some analytical research that’s a bit more complicated, like comparing keyword trends to daily traffic, or top landing pages to popular keywords, things aren’t intuitive. You need to view a single graph and then switch over to the next graph, and if you’re trying to compare multiple blogs that you own all at once, you can forget about it.

This is why I was overwhelmingly pleased to discover Trakkboard, an amazing new application that plugs into and helps you with tracking Google Analytics accounts at once and provides you with a powerful dashboard where you can view as many statistics as you want all in one place.

Trakkboard – A High Level Overview Of Important Analytics Data

Trakkboard is a desktop AIR Google Analytics tracking application that runs in Windows, Mac or Linux. The owner of Trakkboard is Trakken Web Services GmbH of Germany, a company founded by two former Google employees, Timo Aden and Lennart Paulsen, in 2008. The company’s mission is to help businesses improve site optimization (whether that’s web traffic, conversions or both). Trakkboard is provided by a consultancy focusing on web analysis and conversion optimization.

Before getting into the Trakkboard Google Analytics tracking application, I’d like to quickly take a look at the standard Google Analytics display and point out what areas are lacking. Then, we’ll dig into Trakkboard and I’ll show you why simply using a more effective tool can significantly improve your optimization efforts.

In Google Analytics, you use the dropdown and select the account that you want to review. Given, the analytics screen provides an amazing collection of possible data…but as you can see that data is available for display one website and one account at a time.

With all of this extremely useful data available in Google Analytics, it’s difficult to imagine any other tool that could give you as much insight about your optimization efforts. However, Trakken taps into your Analytics data using the Google Analytics API. Additionally, Trakken can simultaneously log into your multiple Google Accounts and display all of them to you (as well as all of the data available via the API) in one central place – the ideal tool for Google Analytics data tracking.

As you can see, I’ve laid out a dashboard of the traffic for my websites. I have a row along the top with the hard traffic numbers, and then a row along the bottom that provides a realtime feed from Twitter with keyword usage. I do this so that when I see major spikes on Twitter, I have an indicator that a major event related to my blog content may be taking place. This is only one of the many ways that you can use this powerful Analytics Dashboard software to analyze your data in whatever manner you see fit.

When you add a new account, which could include one or more websites, the account name gets added as a new tab at the top of the dashbaord. You can quickly flip through all of your accounts with the click of the mouse (no need to log in and out of Google Analytics).

At the upper left corner of the window, you have the area where you can add new widgets to your dashboard. Right now, the widgets are focused on Google Analytics and all of the data you can pull out of it. However, as you can see the creators of this software have already integrated Twitter feed data into the analytics tools. Currently “More” only has a “Notes” widget that you can use to keep notes in your dashboard, but you can be sure that the developers are very likely working on some cool new widgets that you can incorporate into your optimization analysis and planning.

All of the data that you can retrieve from your Google Analytics account is available in the form of a dashboard widget. This includes pages/visits, top keywords and even any goals that you’ve created from within your Analytics account. For example, one of my favorite widgets is the one below that lets you break down your traffic sources in a line diagram that lets you see where your most significant incoming traffic is coming from in a graphical way. This is useful when there are major changes, because it’s much easier to notice a graphical change than it is to catch a numerical anomaly.

The power and usefulness of this tool is limited only by your own imagination and whether you can find a way to make good use of the data comparisons that are available there.

I love the Twitter widget. The ability to keep an eye on Twitter keywords in direct comparison to your site traffic and other stats provides you with some insight as to how well you’re catching traffic from social network buzz. It also gives you an alert mechanism when a major Internet meme flashes across the web.

If you’re interested in giving Trakkboard a try, go to the start page and submit your email address. Within a short time, you’ll receive a “Key” and a weblink you can use to download the application. So, why not give TrakkenBoard a try and start monitoring all of your Analytics data in real-time from one convenient desktop application? Once you do, come back and share your own feedback about the software in the comments section below.