Introduction to dashboards and shortcuts Video Lecture | Google Analytics: For Beginners - Data & Analytics

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.