Starting a couple of months ago, you can now set up custom dashboards in Google Analytics (GA). From experience I know that many people find the amount of available information in Analytics daunting. Therefore I wrote this overview to make sure you can get actionable information from your statistics. Setting up an actionable GA dashboard only takes about 5 minutes. After it's set up, you can stay up to date regarding your visitors statistics by spending only a couple of minutes per day in GA. Let's get started! Create a dashboard containing the following widgets:

Avg. Time on Site

• Where: Audience > Overview > Metric: Avg. Time On Site (Timeline)
• What: The average amount of time a visitor spends on the website.
• Why: To monitor if changes (intended or unintended) are causing the visitors to stay significantly longer or shorter on the website.
• Decreased: Have other metrics (such as the 'Bounce Rate' or 'Site speed') also dropped significantly? Then there might be a technical problem with the website causing visitors to leave faster than otherwise. Learn more about 'Avg. Time on Site' and how to increase it: Website Analytics What is a Good Average Time on Site?.
• Increased: Check out the Subversion or Git logs to see if any changes have been made to the website that might cause visitors to stay longer on the website. Perhaps any notes have been made in Google Analytics? Has a popular and lengthy article, infographic or video been published?

Timeline

• Where: 'Add Widget' > Timeline > Graph: Visits - compare with - Visitors (Timeline)
• What: Both Visits (which represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site) and Visitors (unique number of sessions created in the selected time range). For more details, check out: What's the difference between clicks, visits, visitors, pageviews, and unique pageviews?.
• Why: To monitor if your website is attracting more or fewer visitors over time, and whether the amount of times these visitors come back to your website increases or decreases over time.
• Decreased: Check out additional reports on traffic sources such as 'Direct visits', 'Organic Search Visits' and 'Referral Visits'. Are there reports showing a significant decrease in one or more of these traffic sources? What might be causing this? Also check out the site speed report. If the website has been responding slow for a prolonged period of time, returning visitors might stop coming back and even Google might have penalized the site if the drop in speed is severe.
• Increased: Try to find out what caused this so you can replicate it or make the effect stronger. Has any of your content gone popular or even viral on social media channels? Has your website been linked to by a large news website? More detailed information is available in the reports on traffic sources such as 'Direct visits', 'Organic Search Visits' and 'Referral Visits'.

Bounce rate

• Where: Audience > Overview > Bounce Rate (Timeline)
• What: The percentage of initial visitors to a site who 'bounce' away to a different site, rather than navigate to other pages within the same site. More on 'Bounce rate' and how to decrease yours: Help, My Bounce Rate is High.
• Why: To monitor if changes (intended or unintended) are causing a larger or smaller percentage of visitors to navigate away from your website (without viewing any other page than the one they landed on).
• Decreased: This is almost always good, a larger percentage of visitors is viewing more than one page per visit on your website. Try to find out what caused this so you can replicate it or make the effect stronger. Have you recently added methods of interaction to your website (commenting, related blogs, cross-promotions, etc.)?
• Increased: This is almost always bad, a larger percentage of visitors is viewing only one page per visit on your website. What happens when you exclude all traffic landing on your blog from the analysis (you can use 'Advanced Segments' for this)? Are there any problems with the 'Site speed' of your website? People don't like to wait for a website to load, so any problems with the loading speed will make it less likely for them to navigate to another page on your site.

Direct Visits

• Where: Traffic Sources > Sources > Direct (Timeline)
• What: The amount of visitors that reach your website by typing in the URL directly (so without clicking a link or via a search engine), via a desktop application (such as their email or Twitter client) or via a browser bookmark.
• Why: To monitor if changes (intended or unintended) are causing the amount of direct visitors to your website to increase or decrease.
• Decreased: Research if either 'Referral Visits' or 'Organic Search Visits' has decreased as well. If this is the case, there might be a larger problem with the website (such as a terribly slow website). If this isn't the case, then perhaps something specific to only direct visitors is happening, such as a faulty code for handling the redirect or your-domain.com (which you're not using) to www.your-domain.com (your actual website).
• Increased: Research if either 'Referral Visits' or 'Organic Search Visits' has increased as well. If this is the case, these visitors very likely simple mark those visiting your website via desktop clients for email and social media. However, if the other channels haven't increase then it's often a tough one to find out what is causing this. Perhaps an offline event or campaign (such as an article in a magazine or newspaper, TV commercial or show, radio advertisement, conference, etc.) was launched? Try gathering data from outside Google Analytics to pinpoint where this increase is coming from.

Organic Search Visits

• Where: Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic (Timeline)
• What: The amount of visitors that reach your website via a search engine (unpaid traffic).
• Why: To monitor if changes (intended or unintended) are causing the amount traffic from search engines to your website to increase or decrease.
• Decreased: A drop in 'Organic Search Visitors' could have a variety of reasons. Review the following articles for more information: 10 Possible Causes For a Drop in Traffic to Your Website and Google Rankings Dropped After Switching to Joomla!?.
• Increased: It would be interesting to know whether this increase traffic is 'Branded' (using keywords specific to your brand) or 'Unbranded' (using keywords not specific to your brand). Is this increase sustained over a longer period? Is this increase related to any major holidays that are coming up? Has the amount of keywords that are delivering traffic increased or the amount of people using a certain set of keywords? Is there a small subset of keywords bringing in more traffic or is the increase visible for the majority of keywords?

Referral Visits

• Where: Traffic Sources > Sources > Direct (Timeline)
• What: The amount of visitors that reach your website via a link (which could be both text or image) from another website.
• Why: To monitor if changes (intended or unintended) are causing the amount traffic from other websites to your website to increase or decrease.
• Decreased: This is actually a pretty unlikely event because links tend to build up over time causing more visitors to reach you via other websites. Unlike 'Organic Visits' the 'Referral Visits' are normally pretty stable over time and tends to increase (assuming good content is published). If however the 'Referral Visitors' does significantly decrease one or more links that were generating a lot of traffic might have been removed from other websites.
• Increased: In most cases this is a good thing. Do mind that negative press tends to send in even more visitors than positive press, so keep an eye out for the sources of the increased traffic. By monitoring which websites are sending you traffic you might also be able to create new partnerships or find other websites related to yours.

Avg. Page Load Time

• Where: Content > Site Speed (Timeline)
• What: Tthe average page load time (in seconds) for all monitored pages on your website.
• Why: To monitor if changes (intended or unintended) are causing the page load time of your website to increase or decrease.
• Decreased: Aside from when the page load times start dropping to extremely low values without any significant changes being made (which could be caused by for example scripts or images unintentionally not being loaded) this is probably a good thing. Page loading time is said to significantly affect many other metrics on your website, including 'Bounce Rate' and 'Goal Conversions'. More on 'Page Load Time' in this infographic by KissMetrics: How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line.
• Increased: This is almost always a problem you want to fix as soon as possible. Do mind that especially on websites with a fairly low amount of unique visitors, sampling problems might strongly affect that 'Avg. Page Load Time'. Sorting the results by 'Avg. Page Load Time (sec)' and checking the 'Page Load Sample' might show any outliers skewing the data. Another interesting set of data is shown by clicking on the 'Technical' link (next to 'Site Usage') which shows a break-down on a technical level about the loading of the page. Having a dissected view of the page load allows you to more clearly pinpoint where problems with an increased 'Page Load Time' are coming from. Lastly it could be interesting to check out the 'Performance' and 'Map Overlay' tabs (next to 'Explorer') to get an even clearer picture of the distribution of page load time buckets and geographical locations.

Goal Conversions

• Where: Conversions > Goals > Overview (Timeline)
• What: The amount of goal conversions on your website.
• Why: To monitor if changes (intended or unintended) are causing the amount of completed goals for your website to increase or decrease.
• Decreased: This will often be very difficult to pinpoint. One should start by checking out all the metrics above to see if anything changed there that might negatively influence the amount of 'Goal Conversions'. Assuming this yields no success, one might ask friends or relatives to check out the site to see if anything strange is happening (such as a problem with your navigation structure that only occurs on certain operating systems or browsers). If possible also compare the data to the same data of previous year(s) and your colleagues or competitors (when this data is available).
• Increased: Awesome, your site is doing what you want it to do! Check the metrics explained above to see if any changes can be found there that you can amplify even more to increase your 'Goal Conversions' even higher.

General notes

• When investigating changes in any metric, make sure you compare these changes to weekly, monthly and yearly averages. This will rule out any seasonal or temporal factors that will predictably skew data over time. It might also help to check out the 'Intelligence events' section (Home > Intelligence events > Overview) to see if any changes are marked there.
• Regularly visit your website using as many different devices (desktop computers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones), operating systems (Windows, Apple OS, iOS, Android, etc.) and browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) as you can. Any problems related to any of the factors above might strongly affect any metrics mentioned above.