Video transcript
Having a custom dashboard in your Google Analytics account allows you to view only the information you find useful for your particular situation or the specific situation if someone else might be on your team.
This video will show you how to create and manage custom dashboards in your GA account. Now of course, to do this, you have to be logged into your Google Analytics account. And you can do that a couple of different ways. Right now, I’m on the Google Analytics homepage and I’ve already signed into my Google account or my Gmail account. But you can do the same thing through AdWords or whatever Google account you have access to. So when I click on Sign In here, it’s going to automatically take me into my GA account. And if you have multiple websites under this one account,
you want to navigate to the URL or to the website you want to create this dashboard for; and then click on the All Website Data link. And unless you customize things, you’re going to end up on the Audience Overview landing page. And what we want to do now to get to the dashboard is over here on the left sidebar. Click on Dashboards up here at the top. And here it will give two different links. Private, which exposes all of the dashboard you’ve created; and the New Dashboard. Now if one or more of your custom dashboards you’ve created is also being shared to other individuals that have access to this account, then there will be a third item up here that says Shared with a drop-down arrow like this one; and you hit that drop-down arrow and it will expose all the dashboards created under the shared accounts.
So right now we want to go ahead and click on New Dashboard. Here you’ve got two options. The Starter Dashboard, which as you can see by this icon, has pre-populated widgets in there which you can go in and edit or delete or move around as you see fit. I’ll cover that in just a second. Or a Blank Canvas. Now there are no wrong answers that you can click on; whichever one you want to get things started. But at this point, you want to be asking yourself good questions relating to the information you want to pull from the dashboard you’re going to be creating. For example, if you’re going to be creating a custom dashboard for Martha over in marketing, well then the information for Martha should be related to the information she needs, obviously; and that will possibly be different than the custom dashboard information you need to pull for Dan over in design. So keep that in mind as you’re thinking about these questions because the answers to those questions will be giving you a better idea as to what widgets or what metrics or dimensions you want to be pulling into your custom dashboard.
That said, let’s go and get this pop your name first off. And for lack of imagination, I’m going to go with Markers Dashboard and I’m going to go with Starter Dashboard just to give you a good feel as to what it will look like once you throw in some dimensions and some widgets. Right now, we’ve got these widgets in here for New Visits, Unique Visitors, visits got a geo-map. This is a Timeline. We’ve got a table. And we’ve got some things that I’m going to delete to clean things up a little bit here. I don’t need that one. I’ll show you here in just a second how to create one of these widgets here. Now while we are here, I’m going to also show you that you can customize the actual layout of your dashboard right up here on the top right, Customize Dashboard. Right now, it’s a 50-50 shot. You’ve got two columns. Both are equal in width. You can go with the 25% and 4 columns. You’ve got 2 columns here where one is bigger than the other one, and so on. So pick whichever one you want. And remember this: You can always come back in and change the stuff later on.
Now to add a widget you want up here, you click on Add Widget. You want to give it a name. And the name should reflect the information that’s going to be contained in that widget. Then you decide on what form you want that information to be displayed. And I’m going to go with table. And depending upon the form you want that information to be displayed depends on how it’s going to be laid out here. The dimension is going to be in this example keyword. Then you want a metric or the results. What do you want to show for that particular dimension. I want a percentage of the new visits and average time on page. You’re going to show the number of rows you want; a maximum of 10 in this example. You can add a filter because maybe you do not want certain keywords to be displayed because that might skew the results you’re actually looking for; again depending upon who this customized dashboard is for. I’m going to leave that out for the time being. Click on Save. And here’s our new widget. You can always come back in here later on and edit that, or just get rid of it altogether.
Now you can also add advanced segments. So let’s say that all these widgets I have in this particular dashboard, I also want to see the search traffic versus paid search traffic. Click on Apply. And it’s going to add those two parameters in here for each item that was displayed in that particular widget. Under browser for search traffic, there are two for Chrome, zero for paid. Then under Internet Explorer, search traffic paid, search traffic, and so on. And if you’re not liking the results or maybe you find later that those results aren’t really what you’re wanting for this particular custom dashboard, then get rid of them.
Now if there’s a widget or information you want in this custom dashboard that you come across quite a bit, let’s say, in your Traffic Sources report, then let’s head on over here and let’s say Direct Traffic; and you want these details. You want this timeline and this table in your custom dashboard. Come on up here. Click on Add a Dashboard. Select the Dashboard that you want to add this particular information to. And in this case, we only have the two markers and the default dashboard. What of this report you want to add? I want to add both the timeline and the table. Click on Add a Dashboard. It’s going to bring us back to our Dashboard with those two widgets added. Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Then, of course, what are you going to do with this information once you get your dashboard created? You can export it as a nifty little PDF, or you can email and this is pretty cool too. You can decide who you want to email it to. And if you’ve got certain groups defined in your Gmail account, then you can start typing in the name of that group and it will populate this with that group name; and this email will be sent out to everyone within that group. And you can do so on an automated basis to be done weekly, daily, or just one time. Pretty nifty. And here’s that shared option I was talking about earlier. It will create an additional item up here under your dashboard’s box. If you share it with other people, that’s a little People+ icon, or just get a link so that you can take that link and toss in an email somewhere. And again, only people that have access to this account will be able to view that. Click on shared dashboard and there you go. It’s in both the private and the shared.
And to close out this video, I’m sure that I’ve missed quite a bit of information on creating customized dashboards – most of which you can get from the help section. Depending upon the page that you’re on, this help section – click on this up here in the top right hand corner – will give you suggested articles again related to the page that you’re on within your GA account. So to get more information on creating, editing, or deleting dashboards, there you go. Go and get out of here.
And that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on creating and managing custom dashboards for your Google Analytics account. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.
Related Videos:
Goolge Analytics Introduction – Account Setup
Goolge Analytics Introduction – User Interface Tour
Goolge Analytics Introduction – Customize your Dashboard
Goolge Analytics Introduction – Adding Users
Goolge Analytics Introduction – Defining Goals
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