Defining Digital Analytics

To begin, let’s start by defining “digital analytics” and why it’s important. So Krista, what’s the
deal with digital analytics?

Well Justin, people usually purchase goods in stages.

In marketing, we have the concept of a purchase funnel. There are different stages within the
funnel that describe customer interactions. A basic purchase funnel includes the following steps:

 Acquisition involves building awareness and acquiring user interest

 Behavior is when users engage with your business
 Conversion is when a user becomes a customer and transacts with your business

In the offline world, this process can be hard to measure. But in the online world, we can measure
many different aspects of the funnel using digital analytics. We can track what online behavior
led to purchases and use that data to make informed decisions about how to reach new and
existing customers.

Digital Analytics in Practice

Think about an online store, such as the Google Merchandise Store. It might have a goal to sell
more t-shirts. Using digital analytics, the store could collect and analyze data from their online
advertising campaigns to see which are most effective and expand those marketing efforts.

For example, the store could analyze geographical sales data to understand if people in certain
places buy a lot of shirts and then run additional advertising campaigns in those areas. They
could also use analytics to understand how users progress through their online shopping cart. If
they notice that users have trouble with a particular step on their website, they can make
changes to the site to resolve the problem.

Different kinds of businesses can benefit from digital analytics:

  Publishers can use it to create a loyal, highly-engaged audience and to better align on-site
advertising with user interests.
 Ecommerce businesses can use digital analytics to understand customers’ online
purchasing behavior and better market their products and services.
 Lead generation sites can collect user information for sales teams to connect with
potential leads.

While we’ve primarily talked about collecting data from a website, Google Analytics can also
collect behavioral data from a variety of systems such as mobile applications, online point-of-
sales systems, video game consoles, customer relationship management systems, or other
internet-connected platforms.

That’s right. This data is compiled into Analytics reports, which you can use to perform in-depth
analysis to better understand your customers and their purchase journey. Then you can test out
new solutions to improve your business.

The process of collecting Analytics data

Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and compiles it into useful reports.

Tracking a Website

To track a website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account. Then you need to add a
small piece of Javascript tracking code to each page on your site. Every time a user visits a
webpage, the tracking code will collect anonymous information about how that user interacted
with the page.

For the Google Store, the tracking code could show how many users visited a page that sells
drinkware versus a page that sells houseware. Or it could tell us how many users bought an item
like an Android doll by tracking whether they made it to the purchase confirmation page.

But the tracking code will also collect information from the browser like the language the
browser is set to, the type of browser (such as Chrome or Safari), and the device and operating
system used to access the Google Store. It can even collect the “traffic source,” which is what
brought users to the site in the first place. This might be a search engine, an advertisement they
clicked on, or an email marketing campaign.

Keep in mind that every time a page loads, the tracking code will collect and send updated
information about the user’s activity. Google Analytics groups this activity into a period of time
called a “session.” A session begins when a user navigates to a page that includes the Google
Analytics tracking code. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. If the user returns to a
page after a session ends, a new session will begin.

Processing and Reporting

When the tracking code collects data, it packages that information up and sends it to Google
Analytics to be processed into reports. When Analytics processes data, it aggregates and
organizes the data based on particular criteria like whether a user’s device is mobile or desktop,
or which browser they’re using.

But there are also configuration settings that allow you to customize how that data is processed.
For example, you might want to apply a filter to make sure your data doesn’t include any internal
company traffic, or only includes data from a particular country or region that’s important to your
business.

And Justin, one very important thing to remember.

What’s that?

*Once Analytics processes the data, it’s stored in a database where it can’t be changed*

Great point, Krista! So remember, when you set up your configuration, don’t exclude any data you
think you might want to analyze later. Once the data has been processed and stored in the
database, it will appear in Google Analytics as reports. We’ll show you what these reports look
like a little later.

The Analytics account structure

Now that you know how data gets collected, let’s look at how Google Analytics accounts are
organized.

All of your Google Analytics accounts can be grouped under an “Organization,” which is optional.
This allows you to manage multiple Google Analytics accounts under one grouping.
Large businesses or agencies could have multiple accounts, while, medium to small-sized
businesses generally (only) use one account. When you create an account, you also
automatically create a property and, within that property, a view for that account. But each
Analytics account can have multiple properties and each property can have multiple views. This
lets you organize your Analytics data collection in a way that best reflects your business.

The Google Analytics Account determines how data is collected from your websites and
manages who can access that data. Typically, you would create separate Analytics accounts for
distinct businesses or business units.

Each Google Analytics account has at least one “property.” Each property can collect data
independently of each other using a unique tracking ID that appears in your tracking code.

You may assign multiple properties to each account, so you can collect data from different
websites, mobile applications, or other digital assets associated with your business. For
example, you may want to have separate properties for different sales regions or different
brands. This allows you to easily view the data for an individual part of your business, but keep in
mind this won’t allow you to see data from separate properties in aggregate.

View Settings

Just as each account can have multiple “properties,” each property can have multiple “views.”
You can use a feature called Filters in your configuration settings to determine what data you
want to include in the reports for each view.
For example, The Google Store sells merchandise from their website across different
geographical regions. They could create one view that includes all of their global website data.
But if they wanted to see data for individual regions, they could create separate views for North
America, Europe, and Asia. If the Google Store wanted to only see data for external traffic (that
didn’t include their own store employees), they could set up a view that filtered out internal traffic
based on IP address.

The view level also lets you set Google Analytics “Goals”. Goals are a valuable way to track
conversions, or business objectives, from your website. A goal could be how many users signed
up for an email newsletter, or how many users purchased a product. We’ll discuss Goals and
Conversions in a later lesson. Be thoughtful when setting up your accounts, properties, and
views, because you can’t change data once it’s been collected and processed. by Google
Analytics.

Before we move on to user access permissions, there are a couple important things to note
about views: 
 1. New views only include data from the date the view was created and onwards. When you
create a new view, it will not include past data.
2. If you delete a view, only administrators can recover that view within a limited amount of
time. Otherwise, the view will be permanently deleted.

User Permissions

You can assign permissions to other users at the account, property, or view level. Each level
inherits permissions from the level above it.

For example, if you have access to an account, then you have the same access permissions to
the properties and views underneath that account. But if you only have access permissions for a
view, then you won’t have permission to modify the property or account associated with that
view.

By clicking “Admin”, Google Analytics lets you set user roles for: “Administrator,” “Editor,”
“Analyst,” or “Viewer.”

 “Administrator” lets users add or remove user access to the account, property, or view.
 “Editor” lets users make changes to the configuration settings.
 “Analyst” allows users to share things like dashboards or certain measurement settings.
 And finally, “Viewer” lets users view data, analyze reports, and create dashboards, but
restricts them from making changes to the settings or adding new users.

How you configure your organizations, accounts, properties, and views can affect how your data
gets collected. Be thoughtful when setting up your Google Analytics implementation, and make
sure you align your properties and views of the data you collect with your overall business
structure.

Note that an Administrator may now recover a deleted view within 35 days (not 30 days as
described in the video).
Get started: You can use your standard Google account to access Google Analytics
at analytics.google.com.
Get started: You can use your standard Google account to access Google Analytics
at analytics.google.com.

If you don’t have an account, you can create one by going to the Google Analytics
website (analytics.google.com) and clicking the link for "Create Account."

Once logged in, you'll be introduced to Google Analytics and given the option to Sign
Up. Proceed by signing up for Google Analytics.

If you don’t have an account, you can create one by going to the Google Analytics
website (analytics.google.com) and clicking the link for "Create Account."

Once logged in, you'll be introduced to Google Analytics and given the option to Sign
Up. Proceed by signing up for Google Analytics.

Account Setup:  You can type in an account name of your choice. We’ll call this
“Google Store.”

You'll also have the option to link an organization and view your account data
sharing settings.  These settings can help Google Analytics perform critical systems
operations and allow you to control the sharing of your Analytics data. Leave these
checked for now.

Account Setup:  You can type in an account name of your choice. We’ll call this
“Google Store.”

You'll also have the option to link an organization and view your account data
sharing settings.  These settings can help Google Analytics perform critical systems
operations and allow you to control the sharing of your Analytics data. Leave these
checked for now.
 

 What do you want to measure?  Google Analytics will ask whether you want
to measure a website, a mobile app, or both.  If you want to measure a
 website, you don't need to do anything, because "Web" is selected by default.
Simply click the "Next" button at the bottom of the section.

 While this course covers Google Analytics primarily for measuring website
traffic, you may also choose to measure your mobile app or explore new
capabilities that bring app and web analytics together. Learn more by clicking
"Using App + Web properties" in the "Read further" section.
What do you want to measure?  Google Analytics will ask whether you want to
measure a website, a mobile app, or both.  If you want to measure a website, you
don

't need to do anything, because "Web" is selected by default. Simply click the "Next"
button at the bottom of the section.

While this course covers Google Analytics primarily for measuring website traffic,
you may also choose to measure your mobile app or explore new capabilities that
bring app and web analytics together. Learn more by clicking "Using App + Web
properties" in the "Read further" section.




 Property setup: You can set up your property by first naming the website you
wish to track. We’ll call this “Google Merchandise Store."  Next, add your
website URL. We’ll use the address for the Google Merchandise Store.

  You can also select your industry category. This helps Google Analytics build
better reports and education that are tailored for your industry.  To choose
your industry, click the “Select One” drop-down menu. Since we’re setting this
up for the Google Store, we selected “Shopping.”

 You can also adjust the time zone you wish to report in.
Property setup: You can set up your property by first naming the website you wish
to track. We’ll call this “Google Merchandise Store."  Next, add your website URL.
We’ll use the address for the Google Merchandise Store.

Tracking Code: In your new property settings, you'll be given your new Javascript
tracking code. Notice that this code includes your tracking ID.

Once you add this code to your website pages, Google Analytics will be able to
measure user behavior on your site and send the data back to your Google Analytics
account.  We'll copy the code from this page and paste it into the HTML of every
page of the Google Store website, immediately after the opening <head> tag. (Note
that some third-party websites like WordPress may have an automated process for
including Google Analytics tracking code).

If you need to locate your tracking code again, you can always find it in the “Admin”
area, under "Tracking Info," then "Tracking Code." Your tracking code will appear in
the tracking code field.
Tracking Code: In your new property settings, you'll be given your new Javascript
tracking code. Notice that this code includes your tracking ID.

Once you add this code to your website pages, Google Analytics will be able to
measure user behavior on your site and send the data back to your Google Analytics
account.  We'll copy the code from this page and paste it into the HTML of every
page of the Google Store website, immediately after the opening <head> tag. (Note
that some third-party websites like WordPress may have an automated process for
including Google Analytics tracking code).

If you need to locate your tracking code again, you can always fi




Check Realtime Overview: After you add the code to your site, you can check the
Realtime Overview report in Google Analytics to make sure it’s working correctly.
Realtime reports show current user activity like the number of users on the site right
now.
Check Realtime Overview: After you add the code to your site, you can check the
Realtime Overview report in Google Analytics to make sure it’s working correctly.
Realtime reports show current user activity like the number of users on the site right
 

How to set up account views with filters

To see what views are currently available for a property, click the “Admin” tab at the top.

Then, under View, click “View Settings.”

You can see that when you first create a property, Analytics automatically sets up an unfiltered
view called “All Web Site Data.” This contains all of the raw, unchanged data you collected for the
property. We recommend changing the name to “Raw data,” so you’ll know that the data hasn’t
been filtered. To change the name, we’ll simply type in the new name. Now click “Save.”
Setting up a Test View

Next, we’ll set up a “test view” to test our settings. If we configure something incorrectly, we may
inadvertently lose data we want to collect. So it’s best to test all of our configurations in this test
view first.

 To set up a test view, at the top left, click the view selector pull-down menu.
 Then select “Create new view.” We’ll name this view “Test View.”
  Now click “Create view.”

Notice that we are now in the “Test View” for this property. We recommend adding a setting to
the test view that filters your data for automated bot and spider traffic.
  For this Test View, select “View Settings."
 Then we’ll scroll down.
 Under “Bot Filtering,” select “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”. This will help
filter out bot traffic.

 Now click “Save.”

Creating a Master View

Next, let’s create the Master view. This will be the view that we use to do all of our reporting and
analysis. We can simply copy the test view and rename it.

 To copy the view, in the top right corner click “Copy view.”
  We’ll rename the view “Master View.”
 Now click “Copy view.”

If you go into the View menu, you can see that we’ve successfully copied and created this new
view. By copying the view, all of our settings and filters we created like excluding bot traffic will
also be included in the new view.

Adding Additional Filters

Now we have three views that can be used to back-up our data, test new analytics configurations,
and do our daily reporting and analysis.

But we still need to add filters to determine what data we want Analytics to display in each view.
We’ll first set up a common filter on the “Test” view to exclude internal IP traffic. That way, we
can measure online Google Store behavior strictly for external customers, without any employee
influence.

 In the right-hand column under “View,” change the view selector from “Master View” to
“Test View.” This will ensure we are creating our filters in the right view.
 Now click “Filters.”
  Then click “Add Filter.” We’ll name this filter “Exclude internal traffic.”

Analytics offers two kinds of filters, “Predefined” and "Custom" Filters. Predefined filters are
templates for the most common filters you’ll use. Custom filters let you design a filter to include,
exclude, or modify data. Since excluding data by IP address is common, Analytics offers a
predefined filter for that, so we’ll leave the filter type as “Predefined.”

 Next, click “Select Filter Type.”

 Then select “Exclude.”

 Now click “Select source or destination”
 And select “traffic from the IP addresses.”
 Finally, click “Select expression.” And select “that are equal to.”

 Now we’ll type in the IP address we want to exclude. You can find your public IP address
by opening a new tab and searching for “what is my ip?” in Google.
 Now we’ll copy the IP address into the IP address field.
  At the bottom, click “Save.”

Note that the filter we just created now shows up in the list of filters.

Once we’ve saved this filter and applied it to a view, Google Analytics will check the IP addresses
of traffic to the web property and exclude those that match the filter. It will take a little time for
the filter to catch all of the traffic. To test that the filter is excluding internal traffic, click
Reporting.Then, click “Real-Time” in the left-hand navigation. Now click “Overview.”
This shows you a report of real-time traffic to your website. If you’re on your internal network, you
should notice that your internal user traffic should decline over the next 30 minutes. Once the
filters have taken effect, Analytics won’t collect any internal activity for the IP address you
filtered.

Once you’ve verified this filter is working in your test view, you can add it to your master view.
Click on the Admin tab again. Then select the View pull-down menu.

Select the “Master View.” Now click “Filters.” Then click “Add Filter.” Now, instead of “Create new
Filter,” select the radio button for “Apply existing Filter.”
This will allow you to select from a list of filters you’ve previously created. Click Save.

Now you can see that the filter is applied to the “Master View.”

Note that if you apply multiple filters to a view, each filter will be applied in the order they appear
in your filter settings. So if you have two filters, the data will pass through the first filter before
passing through the second. So be mindful of the order in which you apply your filters.

It’s that easy to create or add predefined filters to views to make sure you’re collecting and
protecting the data you need.

Account/Property/View switcher

If you have multiple accounts, properties, or views set up, you can easily switch between them by
clicking on the pulldown menu with the title of your View in the upper-left corner.
When you open up the account picker, you can select by account, property, or view. You can also
search any of these by name. To close the Account picker, click anywhere on the screen outside
of the picker.

Alert icon

Clicking the bell icon in the upper right shows you alerts about your Google Analytics properties
and views.

Alert menu

This may include data that is not collecting properly or a setting that needs to be optimized. To
close the Alerts menu, click anywhere on the screen outside of the alerts.
Feedback, Help, and Settings

At the top right of your Analytics view are two more icons:

 The "question mark" icon lets you send feedback to Google Analytics or search Help
articles
 The user icon lets you switch between different Google accounts, manage your current
Google account, or sign out

Customization

The Customization section allows you to create custom reports, specific to your business. We'll
cover customization in an advanced course.
Left-hand navigation

To navigate between reports, you’ll use the navigation on the left. Clicking on each of these
sections will expose the reports that belong to each section.

Real-Time Reports

Real-Time reports let you look at live user behavior on your website including information like
where your users are coming from and if they’re converting.

Audience Reports

Audience reports show you characteristics about your users like age and gender, where they’re
from, their interests, how engaged they were, whether they’re new or returning users, and what
technology they’re using.

Acquisition Reports

Acquisition reports show you which channels (such as advertising or marketing campaigns)
brought users to your site. This could include different marketing channels such as:
  "Organic” (or unpaid search)
 “CPC” (“cost per click” or paid search)
 “Referral” (traffic that comes from another website)
 “Social” (from a social network)
 or “Other,” (a group of low volume traffic sources)

Behavior Reports

Behavior reports show how people engaged on your site including which pages they viewed, and
their landing and exit pages. With additional implementation, you can even track what your users
searched for on your site and whether they interacted with specific elements.

Conversion Reports

Conversion reports allow you to track website goals based on your business objectives.

Admin

The Admin section contains all of your Google Analytics settings such as user permissions,
tracking code, view settings, and filters.

Collapse left-hand navigation

Use this pointer to shrink the navigation and provide more space for your reports.

Date range

At the top of every report is a date-range. This lets you set the time period in which you want to
analyze report data. Click the date range to open up the date range selector.
Date range selector

This opens up a calendar on the left where you can select your date ranges. When you change
the date range, it affects all of the reports in your view. So you can switch between different
reports without having to adjust the date range each time.

You can choose between date ranges like last week, last calendar month, or last 30 days. But you
can also set specific dates by clicking the start- and end-date fields and selecting calendar dates.
If you’d like to select an entire month, simply click on the name of the month in the calendar to
the left.

Date Range Comparison

You can also compare data from two different date ranges by clicking "Compare to" and adding
in the date ranges you wish to compare. This lets you to see how your business changed over
time. 
Segment Picker

At the top of the report, notice the segment picker. Segments are ways to look at a specific data
set and compare metrics. We’ll cover this in an advanced course. For now, notice that the default
segment includes all of the Users that visited your site in the given date range.

Line Graph

Below the segment picker are the different metrics of the Audience Overview report shown in
different formats. The most prominent is a line graph that by default shows a data point for the
number of users on each day over your selected date range. 

Duration Selector

If you wish to view this data more specifically, you can change the data points to show hourly,
weekly, or monthly, as well. This can be especially helpful when looking at large date sets. If you
are looking at data over a single day, the view will default to hourly.
Metric Selector

You can change the metric shown from users to a different metric by selecting the drop-down
menu under the Overview tab. Analytics lets you compare this to a second metric over the same
time period by clicking “Select a metric”.

Graph Annotator
Notice the small arrow at the bottom of the line graph. Clicking on the arrow lets you annotate
the graph with helpful notes to add business context to your data. Once you add an annotation, a
small indicator will appear on the graph that can be viewed by other users with access to the
view. Clicking any of the metrics below will show the data points for those metrics in the line
graph above.

Metrics

There are a number of helpful metrics beneath the line graph:

 “Sessions” are the total number of sessions for the given date range. 
 “Users” are the total number of users that visited for the given date range,
 “Pageviews” are the total number of times pages that included your Analytics tracking
code were displayed to users. This includes repeated viewings of a single page by the
same user.
 “Pages per session” is the average number of pages viewed during each session. This
also includes repeated viewings of a single page.
 “Average session duration” is the average length of a session based on users that visited
your site in the selected date range.
 “Bounce rate” is the percentage of users who left after viewing a single page on your site
and taking no additional action.
 “Percent of new sessions” is the percentage of sessions in your date range who are new
users to your site.

New vs. Returning Users

To the right of the metrics is a pie chart illustrating the percentage of new vs. returning users.
Dimensions and Metrics

Understanding Dimensions and Metrics (0:51)

Clicking into the dimensions on the bottom left of the report, will allow you to see the top 10
dimensions and metrics in each category. 

Language Dimension

The default dimension selected in the Audience Overview report is “Language.” Note that the
table to the right includes the top 10 values for Language. You can also select "Country" or "City"
to view the top 10 values for those dimensions.
To view metrics about what technology people are using to view your site, click Browser
or Operating System.

Navigating full reports: Part 1

Introduction

Previously, we showed you a high-level version of the “Audience Overview” report. At the bottom
of that report, there’s a link to “view full report,” where you can see expanded versions of each
Audience report in the left-hand navigation.

Now, let’s check out a full report.

When you open up the full report, you’ll see links underneath the segment picker that control the
different types of data in the report. The “Summary” view is a summary of the dimension
categorized by Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics. This makes it easier to interpret
these metrics in the context of the marketing funnel we discussed in Unit 1.
“Site Usage” shows behavior metrics like users, sessions per user, new users, sessions, pages
per session, and average session duration. “Goals” will show metrics based on the number of
goals you’ve configured and will only show up if you’ve set up goals in Google Analytics, which
we’ll discuss later. And “Ecommerce” will show you transaction metrics if you’ve set up
ecommerce tracking in Analytics. Now let’s switch back to the Summary view.

Below the graph is the main data table. You can see that the first column shows the current
dimension “Country,” which was the last demographic category we selected in the Overview
report. You can switch between other dimensions like city, continent, and subcontinent by
clicking the links above the data table. It’s important to know you can also add another
dimension to the table for even more specific analysis. We call this a secondary dimension,
which is a common technique when analyzing data. For example, you could add a secondary
dimension of “device category” to the Location report to see what kinds of devices were used by
people in different countries while visiting your website.

Here you can see that each row of the table represents a different segment of traffic in the
“Country” dimension. Note that Analytics is only showing you the first 10 rows of data and only
as many columns as will fit on the screen. To view additional rows, use the “Show rows”
pulldown menu on the bottom-right side of the table to select how many rows you want to see, or
use the left and right arrows to scroll through 10 rows at a time. If you wish to view all of the
columns, you may need to use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the report.

You can analyze the data table in different ways. Clicking on each column in the table toggles the
data sort between ascending and descending. The arrow in the column header shows which
column you’re currently sorting by. Note that by default, Analytics sorts this report by users.

It can also be useful to filter the data table to focus only on the segments of traffic that are
significant. Use the filter field at the top of the table to include only rows where the primary
dimension contains your filter term. For example, you may want to look at data for a specific
country like India, so rather than scroll through the table, you could simply type “India” into the
filter field and Analytics will show you only data for segments that include the term “India.”
“Advanced,” next to the search box, lets you apply even more sophisticated rules for filtering.
We’ll cover techniques for advanced filtering in an advanced course.

Report Visualization

 Next to the “advanced” link, there are several different visualization options:
 The “data table” view is the default visualization for most reports. This organizes your
data in a table broken out by acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics for the
audience and acquisition reports.
 The “pie chart” icon creates a pie chart based on your data. This helps you compare the
percentages of a whole such as how many users are on desktops, tablets, and mobile
phones. You can choose which metric from your report should display in the pie chart
using the pulldown menu.
 The “performance” view shows a bar graph of your data. This helps you compare
individual segments side by side like which countries bring in the highest traffic. You can
also use the pull-down menu to select various metrics to be represented as bars.
 The “comparison view” shows you a bar graph to quickly see whether each entry in the
table is performing above or below the site average for the selected metric. If the value
for a given row is better than average, it appears green. If it’s below average, it appears
red. Again, you can use the drop-down menu to select which metric should be displayed.
 Finally, the “Pivot” view creates a pivot table in which both rows and columns can show
different dimension values for comparison. For example, a pivot table could show The
Google Store the bounce rate and number of sessions for each landing page and device
type.

How to share reports

Sharing and customizing reports

Once you’ve found meaningful data in your reports, Google Analytics offers several ways to share
or refer back to that report under the report name at the top.

 “Save” lets you create a link to the specific report in the Customization area in the left-
hand navigation under “Saved Reports.”
  “Export” lets you save a report to your desktop in different file formats such as PDF or
CSV.
 “Share” lets you email a copy of the report as an attachment and even schedule regular
email updates.
 “Edit” lets you customize the report content by adding metric groups, filters, or additional
views. This creates a new report in the Customization area of the left-hand navigation
under “Custom Reports.” We'll cover Custom Reports in the advanced course.

Hover over the green check icon next to the report name to view the percent of sessions that the
report is based on. Sometimes, Analytics has to crunch through so much data, that in order to
return your report faster, it will only analyze a sample of the data collected. This is called
“sampling” because it returns an estimate of the exact count based on a sample of your data.

To change the report sampling rate, mouse over the green data quality icon and click the
pulldown menu. If you want your data to be more accurate and don’t mind the additional
response time, leave this set to "Greater Precision". If you wish to speed up the time it takes to
generate a report and are willing to sacrifice more precise metrics, select “Faster response.”
Introduction to dashboards and shortcuts
As we’ve been going through and looking at various reports, it’s clear that some of these metrics
will be more useful for your business than others. In some cases, there may even be metrics 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

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 “Dashboards” in the left-hand navigation to view the reports that
you’ve collected. To create a new dashboard, click Create, select a blank or 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 have 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 on their dashboard, but their
changes will only be visible to them. Your original shared dashboard cannot be changed by
another user.
If you want to share a dashboard, simply click “Share” at the top. “Share 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.

Save Reports
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 to 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. Be sure to check out the “Google Analytics Solutions
Gallery” for some great ideas.