By the way, the most succinct summary of web site stats I’ve seen is a spider graph that compares two web sites across six dimensions. To get an overview, the numbers don’t matter as much as being able to tell how the two sites overlap. With the spider graph one can tell at a glance how the sites compare at the domain and URL level for Trust, Rank and external links.

SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org) does a nice job with that. Their spider graph very quickly communicates on which dimension(s) to focus SEO efforts. Here’s an example: http://www.screencast.com/users/glenncrocker/folders/Jing/media/67a1148d-3cc3-4a05-96ac-abbb6c27059e

Your intended audience likely understands your use of color in this “game plan” quadrant analysis. This is something we do all the time, albeit not with web site analytics, and it quickly communicates. Since you are using a dashboard anyway for Graph 2, would there be any benefit to developing a legend table that shows the values appropriate to each class interval (color) for each of the sites? You could add this to the dashboard as well?

MANY BLESSINGS!
Peace and All Good!
Michael W Cristiani
Market Intelligence Group, LLC

In this post I included the number scales to illustrate a point. For our purposes, the actual numbers don’t matter as much as seeing into which end of the number range each quadrant falls – hence I’m using only four shades of the same color. Dark blue denotes “lots of links” while light blue denotes “few links.” For each site we want to see which quadrant has “lots of links” and which quadrant has “few links.”

For example, seeing lots of links in the “Hi Trust, Hi Rank” quadrant means that we are looking at a site that is considered to be trustworthy and valuable by search engines. Doing this for each individual site allows us to see whether they are evaluated approximately the same or differently by search engines.

This is just a dashboard like overview to see at a glance what’s going on. We have other graphs that look at the data in more detail and break out the number of links differently.