Who wants to log into Google Analytics and try to remember what reports to look at every time or remember where the relevant metrics are? No one. Creating custom dashboards make it easy to log in, and go directly to your report with the metrics you deemed important already.

Imagine logging in and seeing the below:

Why are custom dashboards so important?

They make it so much easier to quickly look at the health of your overall business. These dashboards are perfect for weekly check-ins to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Before creating dashboards, read my previous post on setting business goals to determine the metrics that need to be tracked. After completing your business goals and aligned metrics, the next step is to outline the roles of those who will be looking at these dashboards (CEO, head of marketing, advertising, finance, etc.).

The role of the individual is going to be extremely important because the CEO will want to look at overall health while the marketer might care more about acquisition related metrics.

For each property/view, you can have up to 20 dashboards with 12 widgets each! This provides so many options into creating dashboards by role of individual and/or business goals. For example, for an e-commerce company, you can create:

General "e-commerce" dashboard that hosts metrics deemed important for this type of business
CEO dashboard with overall health of the site (users, revenue per channel, etc.)
Marketing dashboard with acquisition metrics
Content marketing dashboard with information all about blog post traffic

And the list goes on!

How to create custom dashboards

Click on Customization in the right hand navigation and select dashboards.

Next click on "create." Here you will decide between creating your own dashboard or importing from gallery. If you choose to import from gallery, it is very self explanatory. You will be taken to the solutions gallery and once you decide, just press import. All the widgets and your data will transfer over. If you are creating your own, continue reading.

If you are creating your own dashboard, click on "blank canvas" and then "create dashboard."

This is where the fun starts! You can add any combination of metrics to your dashboards to easily check on your website. There are different ways to showcase your metrics as you can see in the image below.

For this example, I will be creating a widget to track visits by Traffic source/medium in the form of a pie chart to easily see which source is bringing in the most users to the site. To create this widget, select:

Pie in the standard section
Users in the "Create a pie chart using" field
1. In this field, you will always be choosing a metric
Source/medium in the "grouped by" field
1. In this field, you will be choosing the dimension to "sort" or "group" the metric selected above

Your selections should look like the following image. Then click on "create widget" and you will see it added to your dashboard! It takes some time to play around with widgets but these can be so helpful to quickly access your data that it will save you time in the long run.