How to Create Your Own Custom Dashboard in Google Analytics?

If you have a slight knowledge of digital marketing then there are chances that you might have heard about ‘Google Analytics’. Marketing is one such thing that requires constant monitoring of statistics and data. Digital marketing also requires you to track website data, monitor traffic, visitor’s behavior, and other stuff.
Google Analytics is a free tool that is used to study parameters that affect your business. It helps you track website traffic, the sources of traffic, how much time people are spending on your website, their behavior, their interests and more.
Analytics provides hundreds of options to constantly examine your site and change your business plan according to that. But there are pros and cons of everything. Though the numerous options help you to draft a perfect marketing strategy, it sometimes tends to confuse the user.
Actually, there are so many features in the Google Analytics and it is very difficult for the beginners to use all of them.
To avoid that Google Analytics provides you with one more amazing feature. Google Analytics lets you create and customize your own dashboard according to your business needs. You can add or remove the widgets you want and make it simpler to use.
In Google Analytics, every view comes loaded with a default dashboard named “My Dashboard”. Most of the time, you will find that the default dashboard is perfect and is sufficient for your business. But there are some instances when you may want to add or remove certain widgets.
This can be done by creating and customizing your dashboard. Before we jump to creating and customizing your new dashboard, let us know what exactly an analytics dashboard is?

Analytics Dashboard

A Google Analytics dashboard is a tool that is used for data visualization and monitoring of the key performance indicators of any business. A dashboard is something that uses widgets which further uses metrics and dimension to give you data that lets you define your business goals.
You can have 20 private dashboards per user in an analytics view. You can also have 50 shared dashboards per view and every dashboard can contain up to 12 widgets.

What is a widget?

It is a mini-report that can help you to view the data in a better form. You can use a number of presentation styles, including tables, charts, different metrics and more. As a user, you can define different widgets within dashboards and customize it according to your needs.
But how can you create a dashboard in Google Analytics? How can you customize it? Well! Here is your guide to creating your customize dashboard according to your business goals.

To create a dashboard in Google Analytics, follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Log in to Google Analytics account.
2. Go to your view.
3. Open the Reports Section.
4. Select CUSTOMIZATION and then Dashboards.
5. Now, click on +New Dashboard.
Now, you will see the create dashboard dialogue box. It will give you two options:
• Blank Canvas (without widgets)
• Starter Dashboard (contains a default set of widgets)
After selecting any one of the options, give a descriptive title to your dashboard and click on ‘Create Dashboard’.

Adding widgets to the analytics dashboard:

After creating a new dashboard, you will be prompted to add widgets to it. Therefore, it is crucial that you know what each widget does.

Here is the list of widgets with their use in Google Analytics:

Metric

It is a numeric representation of any single selected metric. These are numeric values that help you to compare different metrics.

Geomap

This widget lets you see the country and the region from which the traffic is coming. Here you will see a white map with blue shaded region displaying the effect of different metric.

Timeline

This widget makes the use of a line graph to help you monitor the change in a particular metric. You can also use it for comparing two metrics with each other. Looking at the widget you will see a double-line graph with a different color to help you compare different

metrics

.
Table. It displays a table that can contain 2 columns and 10 rows.

Pie Chart

It is also a very helpful widget. You can use it to see data in pie chart form. A single pie chart can have six slices.

Bar Graph

This can help you in displaying your data in bar graph form. You can use 9 bars along with some additional features.

Actually, there are two types of widgets.

• Standard Widgets
• Real-time Widgets
The dimensions of a standard metrics are totally dependent on the date range you select from the upper right corner. These metrics display the dimensions as they are modified over the time.
On the other hand, the real-time metrics displays the live dimensions of the metrics. They can also show you the number of visitors that are currently on your website.

Now, coming back to add a widget to your dashboard. To add a widget to your dashboard, follow the following steps:

1. Create a new dashboard and click on Blank Canvas.
2. Now click on the +add widget.
3. This will open the widget editor of the selected dashboard.
4. Choose the type of widget you want to add and configure the dimensions, metrics and more of the widget.
5. You can also use filters to include or exclude data in the dimensions. As a user, you can add rows and columns as you require.
6. Now enter a widget title and then click on the save button.
So, this is how you can add new widgets to your dashboards according to your needs.
Google Analytics is a great tool that can help you to take your business to a new height. The option to customize your dashboard makes it easy for the people to use it in a better way. It saves the time of users as with the default dashboard there are numerous options that are not even useful for your business. So, customizing the dashboard allows you to pick the parameter that you want to use for your marketing strategy.