Magento allows administrators to quickly see how their website is performing from the moment they log in. This provides users with a snapshot of their websites success on a daily basis, without the need to look at multiple reports. Should you need to dig deeper, Magento provides a host of useful reports and statistics, which I will cover in my other blog posts. Simon.

I will now look at each area of the dashboard individually, I have numbered the blocks in the following diagram, so you can easily see what’s what.

1) Life-time Statistics

Here you can see the life time sales that your website has made since it went live, as well as the average order value of past orders. These figures do not include any delivery charges or shipping. If your store accepts multicurrency transactions these figures include conversion of other currencies to your stores base currency.

Any orders marked as cancelled will not be included within these figures either, so this should be a reasonable representation of your actual transactions to date.

2) Last 5 and Top 5

The first of these 3 boxes displays the last five orders that have been placed on your website. This allows you to see at a glance who placed the order, how many items were sold and the total order value. Clicking on any of these orders will take you directly to the order detail page.

The second box displays the last five search terms entered in your websites search box. As well as telling you what people are searching for, if you click on any of these items you can refine these search terms to direct subsequent users to predefined results, so for example you make sure searches made for Men tshirt’s actually searches for men’s t-shirt’s. You can even re-direct the search to a specific page on your website to direct clients to exactly what you want them to see.

Above is a screenshot of the information you will see if you click onto a search result from the dashboard. Below is a explanation of each of these fields:

Search Query : This is the text that someone has typed into the search box on your website.

Store : If you have multiple stores on your Magento system this will show you which one it is from.

Number of Results : How many results were shown to the user the last time someone searched for this term.

Number of uses : how many times this information has been typed into the search box in the past.

Synonym For : This is where you can put in similar words to the search term to help get better results for example t-shirt is the same as tshirt or coffee cup is similar to coffee mug.

Redirect URL : This will allow you to redirect people to a certain link on your website. For example if you have a category which is mens t-shirts and people are searching for this term you can re-direct them into the category rather than having them see the results for their search term.

Display Suggested Terms : When a customer is typing into the search box on your website this test will display below in a box.

The final box allows you to see the top search terms entered on your site. Similar to the latest results this will show you what has been searched for the most on your website since it was launched. You may want to use this information to position regularly searched for products in more featured positions on your website. Again like the latest search terms you can redefine or redirect these.

3) Dashboard Graphs

The third section of the dashboard is really useful to most merchants and shows the success of the site at a glance. The graph plots how many orders and at what time they were placed on the website. You can change the date range from the default 24 hrs to 7 days, current month, year to date and 2 years to date, simply by using the drop down above the graph. This is not only useful to monitor your sites performance, its great to see when your peak times are on your website which can be used to your advantage when planning marketing campaigns for your website.

As well as displaying the qty of orders have come through in a set time period you can also use the tabs at the top to show the total value of orders

Below the graph is a summary of the total revenue generated on your site (excluding tax), the total tax, the total value of shipping charged and finally the total number of orders received.

4) Order Overview Tabs.

The final section on the dashboard is a tabbed section which is separated into four areas. The first of these is a summary of bestsellers, displaying the most popular products that have been ordered on your website. It displays the name of the product, the total qty ordered and the average order value of the product. You can click on any of these products to be taken directly to the product allowing editing of product information.

As the name suggests the most viewed tab displays the most viewed products on the website. It shows the name and the price of the product as well as the number of times the product has been viewed by a customer. Again by clicking on any of the products, it will take you direct to the product detail page.. You may find that the most viewed and the bestselling product may not coincide with each other. Again this information can be useful for making changes or promoting products more on your website. The New customers tab displays the last 5 new customers, it will show you how many orders they have made, the average value of each order, as well as the total value of their orders to date. When you click on one of the customers on this list you will be taken to the customer record.

The final tab in this area is customers. This will show the top customers on your website. Again like the new customers tab you can see the total number of orders they have placed, their average order value, as well as the total value of their orders placed to date.

So there you have it the dashboard explained. Whatever you use this page for you can see that there is plenty of information to keep you up to date with your website as well as also give you new ideas to how to promote your website to get the best out of your online business.

You can get more in depth information for every area of the dashboard, to help you with marketing and promotion within Magento’s reports section. We will cover this in a separate post shortly.