Dashboard

Your at-a-glance overview of website performance.

Overview

The Dashboard is the first screen you see when logging into Ghost Metrics. It provides a quick summary of your website’s key metrics, giving you an immediate sense of how your site is performing. Dashboards are personal — each user arranges their own, and they follow you across the websites you can access.

Common Dashboard Widgets

Visits Over Time

The main graph plots visits over time by default — use the graph’s metric picker to overlay other metrics like unique visitors or pageviews. Hover over the graph to see specific values for each day. The companion Visits Overview widget shows the headline numbers (visits, pageviews, bounce rate, and more) as sparklines.

Real-Time Visitors

A live count of visitors currently on your website, updating automatically. Click through to see which pages they’re viewing, where they came from, and their location and device.

Visits by Time

Shows when your visitors are most active — by day of week and by time of day. Useful for scheduling content, campaigns, and support coverage.

Traffic Sources

A breakdown of where your traffic comes from: search engines, direct entries, referring websites, campaigns, and social networks.

Top Pages

Your most viewed pages ranked by pageviews. Quickly see which content resonates with visitors.

Visitor Map

Geographic distribution of your visitors displayed on a world map.

Devices & Software

Breakdown of visitors by device type, browser, and operating system.

Changing the Date

Reports open showing yesterday by default (you can change your default date and period under Administration → Personal → Settings). To change the date:

1. Click the date selector in the top bar
2. Choose a period (day, week, month, year) and date, or a custom range
3. The dashboard refreshes with that period’s data

Comparing Periods

To compare performance against a previous period:

1. Open the date selector
2. Tick the Compare checkbox and pick the comparison (previous period, previous year, or custom)
3. Reports show both periods with percentage changes

This is useful for seeing trends — is traffic up or down compared to last month?

Switching Between Websites

If you have access to multiple websites:

1. Click the website name at the top of the page
2. Select a different website from the dropdown
3. The dashboard refreshes with that site’s data

The All Websites view shows every site’s headline metrics side by side.

Customizing Your Dashboard

The Manage Dashboard menu (on the dashboard page) is where customization lives:

• Add a widget — Browse the widget picker (with live previews) and add any report, including the KPI Metric widget for single-number KPIs with trend arrows
• Rearrange — Hover over a widget’s top edge until the move cursor appears, then drag it anywhere
• Change dashboard layout — Pick from one to four columns in various widths
• Create new dashboard — Build separate dashboards for different purposes (e.g., “Executive Summary”, “Campaign Watch”), starting empty or from the default widget set
• Rename / Remove / Reset dashboard — Housekeeping for your dashboards (the default dashboard can be reset but not deleted)

Your customizations are saved to your account automatically.

Sharing a Dashboard

Want your whole team to see the same dashboard? Dashboard copies are pushed platform-side — contact support to copy a dashboard you’ve built to other users, or to make a curated widget set the default for new users in your organization.

Dashboard vs Reports

The dashboard provides a quick overview, but for deeper analysis, use the full reports:

Exporting Dashboard Data

Hover over any widget to reveal its controls, including export — choose your format (CSV, TSV, XML, JSON, HTML) and download. For recurring exports, schedule email reports under Administration → Personal → Email Reports.

Next Steps

• Key Metrics — What each number means
• Visitors reports — Deep dive into who’s visiting
• Behavior reports — Understand what visitors do on your site
• Acquisition reports — Analyze where traffic comes from