As we've been going through and looking at various reports, it's clear that some
of these metrics will be more useful to your business than others. In some cases,
there may even be metrics that you want to check regularly to gauge the health
of your business or a particular ad campaign. You can use dashboards and
shortcuts to quickly find these metrics without having to navigate to a specific
report. Dashboards are flexible and may be used for different purposes. For
example, you could create an overview of how your site is performing by
displaying summaries of different reports as widgets together on a single
page or you could gather a list of critical business metrics that show the
state of your business at a glance or compare different reports side-by-side.
Click Customization, then Dashboard in the left-hand navigation to view the
reports that you've collected. to create a new dashboard, click Create. Select a
blank or a starter dashboard and give your dashboard a name. You can add
widgets to a dashboard by clicking Add Widget. This will let you name the widget
that you want to appear on the dashboard and select a visualization type. You can
choose to view the data as a number, a timeline, a map, a table, a pie chart, or a
bar graph. You can select some of these visualizations for standard or real-time
metrics. Use the "add a metric" pulldown menu below to search and add the particular
metric you want to include. You can even add filters to the report widget once you've brought it into the dashboard, similar to the way we set
filters at the view level earlier. Once you've created a dashboard, you can
format it by clicking Customize Dashboard and selecting a layout. You can
also drag and drop existing widgets to different locations within the dashboard.
Mousing over a widget will reveal an edit icon that you can use to edit the
data coming into the report widget. It also reveals a delete icon that allows
you to remove the widget from the dashboard.
There are two types of dashboards: private and shared. A private dashboard
is only visible to you within that view. A shared dashboard can be seen by anyone
who has access to that view. You can have 20 private dashboards per user and 50
shared dashboards per view. If you share the dashboard with other users, they can
change what shows up in their dashboard, but their changes will only be visible
to them. Your original dashboard cannot be changed by another user. If you want
to share a dashboard, simply click Share at the top. "Share a template link" will
provide a link to your dashboard template that can be added to any other
view, but don't worry. This won't include any of your Analytics data. If you wish
to share your template more broadly, you can add the dashboard template to the
Google Analytics Solutions gallery by clicking "Share in Solutions Gallery." The
Solutions Gallery is a place where Google Analytics users can share
different types of customizations like dashboards. It's also a great place to
find dashboard templates that you can import and then customize for your own
business. You can also save reports in order to view them later by clicking
Save at the top of most reports. When you save reports, they include any
customizations you've made the report. For example, if you've filtered the data
table, then that filter will automatically be applied when you access
the report from the Customization area under Saved Reports. Use dashboards and
saved reports to easily retrieve data that's valuable to your business or
share them with other stakeholders. And be sure to check out the Google
Analytics Solutions Gallery for some great ideas.