How to Visualize Your Gmail Account Activity

If you use Gmail, did you know you can tap into your Gmail account activity and visualize your email activity?

You can!

Okay, so why is your Gmail account activity important, and how can you tap into it efficiently?

Glad you asked 😎

Reasons to Visualize Your Gmail Account Activity

Let’s focus on why you might want to visualize your Gmail account activity in the first place.

We often take it for granted, but email is a massive component of most businesses. You’re probably sending and receiving hundreds of emails a day—thousands of emails a week—which means even a slight disruption in your email habits could result in a massive productivity loss.

In fact, 25-50% of the average professional’s workday is spent reading, writing, managing, and checking emails.

Measuring and analyzing your email activity can help you understand and improve the following:

1. Workload indication.

First, your email activity is a general indication of your workload. If you study your email patterns, you may find that you have a disproportionate number of inbound requests on a certain day of the week, or a certain time of day.

This can help you better plan and prioritize your work, ultimately helping you get more done. You may also discover that you handle way more messages than one of your coworkers or one of your employees, indicating it may be wise to rebalance workloads by delegating more of your tasks.

2. Communicative efficiency.

Much of your organization’s success depends on your ability to communicate effectively. If you can’t convey instructions articulately or quickly, your team won’t be able to complete their work in a timely or valuable way. If you aren’t responding to your clients fast enough, you could miss out on sales.

If you spend too much time writing and reading emails, you’ll exhaust countless hours of your day, eating up time that could be better spent on more productive, valuable tasks.

3. Organization and potential.

Most email users don’t spend much time or effort organizing their inbox. Instead of carefully categorizing their emails into respective sections, they let their inbox overflow with messages. Visualizing your email activity can help you understand your current organization habits, and incentivize you to adhere to your new organization strategies. You may also be able to highlight key opportunities for self-improvement.

4. Overall productivity.

There’s no skill cap for improving your email habits. No matter how experienced you are or how much effort you spend, you can always learn more about how to write more persuasive emails, how to word your emails more effectively, how to write more concisely, how to manage email threads more responsibly, and how to respond in an efficient way—without needlessly distracting yourself.

Studying your Gmail activity habits with visuals can help you discover dozens of ways to improve your email-related strategies, and can help you track your improvement as you incorporate those strategies into your daily routine.

5. Employee accounts.

While some of the best benefits of Gmail activity visualization come from your ability to analyze your own workload and your own efforts, don’t forget you can learn key insights by analyzing the activity of your employees’ email accounts as well.

Studying your employees’ email account activity, workloads and habits can help you better structure your workflows, analyze individual strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately improve the performance of your entire team.

By now, you probably understand why it’s so important—and so powerful—to visualize your Gmail account activity. So how can you do it?

Gmail has a lot of built-in tools to help you email more effectively, but unfortunately, there’s no built-in tool to grant you data visuals to help you analyze your email patterns. Accordingly, you’ll need a third-party tool for this purpose.

I may be slightly biased here, but I’m confident that the best tool on the market is EmailAnalytics, an email counter (and much more).

With EmailAnalytics, you can integrate your Gmail account (or your employees’ accounts) with a single click; at that point, the tool syncs your data and presents it to you in easy-to-read graphs and charts to help you understand the activity on each of those accounts.

If you interpret these visuals with the intention of forming actionable insights, you can rearrange workloads, improve your communication strategies, and work more efficiently—ultimately bringing a host of benefits to your organization.

Key Metrics to Track in Your Gmail Account Activity

With EmailAnalytics, you’ll be able to explore dozens of metrics on your Gmail accounts with interactive visuals. These are some of the most important:

1. Emails sent and received.

First, you’ll want to visualize how many emails you’re sending and receiving. It’s a basic metric for your Gmail account activity, but one of the most important for a high-level understanding of how your account works.

It’s especially important if you’re comparing one employee’s Gmail account activity to another’s.

For example, if two employees on the same team share the same responsibilities, but one sends and receives 200 emails a day while the other sends and receives 50, it’s a sign there may be a problem with your team’s workload distribution.

2. Top senders and recipients.

It’s also useful to study the top senders and recipients of each of your Gmail accounts. When you visualize this activity, it should be glaringly obvious that some of your contacts either play a more important role in your daily work, or occupy more of your time than they should.

For example, you may find that one of the clients who pays you the least is one of your top email senders, while one of your most lucrative and important clients rarely sends you messages at all.

This could be a signal that you need to adjust what you charge, or else have a conversation about communicative efficiency.

3. Email traffic by day of the week.

This is effectively a more focused way of tracking productivity and/or workload. With this data visualization, you’ll display how your email traffic changes with each day of the week.

Chances are, you’ll see a major dip Saturday and Sunday, and a spike on Monday and Tuesday, leveling off throughout the rest of the week.

But what else do you notice?

Are there certain days that are much busier than others? Do you notice that one of your employees has a strange drop in traffic on Wednesdays when the rest of your employees show no significant difference in their mid-week emailing habits?

4. Email traffic by hour of the day.

You can also dig deeper and look at how your email traffic changes throughout the hours of the day. Again, you’ll probably notice the common pattern here; you’ll send and receive lots of emails in the first couple hours of the day, with a drop at noon, and a steep drop at 5 pm.

By studying your employees’ Gmail account activity, you might discern different fluctuations in their personal levels of productivity.

This can help you in a few different ways; you might be able to capitalize on someone’s “morning oriented” personality by collaborating with them earlier in the day, or you might adjust how you structure breaks to keep people productive throughout the afternoon.

5. Emails by category.

Visualizing your Gmail account activity can also help you understand how your emails are allocated in your account; for example, you’ll be able to see how many emails are in your inbox, sent folder, trash, and other various categories.

This is mostly an organizational tool, but it can keep you accountable to any organization- and productivity-related goals you set.

For example, if you’re trying to get back to inbox zero, or if you want to spend more time effectively categorizing and prioritizing your emails, you can use this handy visual to gauge whether you’re on the right track.

6. Average email response time.

If you use email as a primary channel for sales or client communication, you should know how vital it is to have a quick email response time. If a prospect reaches out to your team with a request for a quote but it takes two business days to get back to them, they may already be working with one of your competitors.

Tracking email response time is a good way to verify that your current system is working, and help you brainstorm ways to improve it.

For example, you can spot trends of increasing or decreasing email response time, and capitalize on them for future improvements.

If you’re ready to start visualizing your Gmail account activity, you need to give EmailAnalytics a try.

Sign up for a free trial today, and you’ll gain access to all of EmailAnalytics’ interactive data visualization tools instantly. It’s a simple step to take, but it can have a profound effect on your team’s overall productivity—and the future of communication in your business.