WTF Dan? I can’t even say that title, it’s a mouthful!

Sorry, random internet stranger but it sounds smart!

Anyways, performance reporting is good for SEO right? Speed is a critical ranking factor, it’s good for users, and we all just want to feel the need for it. But enterprise-class performance reporting dashboards are tough. Especially ones that are easy to spin up automatically, low resource and actionable.

Do these look like something you would want to have?

Would surfacing performance opportunities automatically and at scale like this be helpful?

Well, have no fear, because that’s what I’m here to walk you through!

So first, check out the end product. Here is a performance dashboard we created for Target (sorry for outing you Target SEO, but hey free report!):

https://datastudio.google.com/open/17bU954JKOK-7xCeSZuipEdgnTYhRYh2-

This dashboard was created by taking a simple two-column spreadsheet (one column with a URL and another with the label), passing it via-.CSV through our Slackbot Jarvis running it through our process, and then outputting it as a Google Data Studio Report. Yes, we have a bot named Jarvis. Don’t you?

It took me about 15 minutes to classify the URLs and about 10 for the report to be run/created. Isn’t living in the future cool? I guess a human could compile all this, but this seems like a real time-saver to allow the human brain to do what it’s best at – analyzing!

Just to get into some of the features, most of the charts can be drilled down into, diagnostic and performance metrics can be looked at holistically or with any subset of templates, and you can track over time to see improvements.

IMHO this is a much better way of doing performance reporting as you can look at not just snapshots of resources on a page, but how they perform across a whole template or even a site. It makes the real costs of particular performance issues much more clear.

Anyway, enough talking.


We are also open sourcing this!


If you want to spin it up for yourself


check out the documentation and get some!

Dan, why did you build this?

Pretty simple it saves us a ton of time on performance reporting in our audits and is a spiffy deliverable for clients that shows them how badass we are at technical SEO. Plus we can iterate on it super easy. Just as an example, adding in competitors to benchmark templates against is gonna be in our next iteration. If you do cool stuff, please share it with me @danleibson on Twitter!

Remember kids technical SEO = local SEO when your queries are local and your web stack is complicated and Google is rapidly localizing search more then they are rolling out any other feature. Don’t put yourself in a box. I don’t let my teammates!

Like most things, this isn’t done in a vacuum so I just want to shout out people like Jamie Alberico for talking me through a bunch of her elvish wizardry around the topic and Hamlet Batista for being willing to just throw stuff out there into public so others can learn.

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4 Response Comments

  • Hamlet Batista  January 22, 2020 at 8:00 am

    Amazing work, Dan!

    I’m really humbled to learn my work inspired you to create this, and best of all share so others can be inspired as well. Keep it up! 👍🏻

    • Dan Leibson  January 23, 2020 at 4:45 pm

      Thanks Hamlet, you = da man! Next thing I post will use Python 😉

  • Ewan Kennedy  January 24, 2020 at 1:10 am

    I love Data Studio and have automated nearly all my client reporting using it which saves me a tonne of time (can you buy time in tonnes?) and presents the data far better than I could previously. It’s always helpful to see how others use it., so thanks (from a mountain top in Vietnam).

    • Dan Leibson  January 24, 2020 at 7:36 am

      “from a mountain top in Vietnam”

      So jealous! Enjoy!