I am guessing there are 3 reasons for this:
Digging into Google Analytics Reporting to find and extract the exact data you need can be time-consuming and overwhelming. But there’s a simple alternative.
With a custom Google Analytics dashboard, you can create a view that shows only the metrics you care about, all on one screen. You can even share your dashboard with others, making reporting easier than ever.
Table of Contents:
Google Analytics dashboards are basically a collection of data visualizations, or “widgets”, that when presented together on one canvas represent your company’s performance across key areas.
These dashboards are completely customizable by user and can include up to 12 widgets. Each user in a Google Analytics account can have up to 20 private dashboards, while each Google Analytics account can have up to 50 shared dashboards.
You can find dashboards listed as the first item under the “Customization” dropdown menu. Here, you’ll find any existing dashboards that have been created in your account.
A widget in Google Analytics is simply a visualization type that represents your performance data, like a bar graph or a table.
When you’re creating or editing a Google Analytics dashboard, there are 6 standard widgets and 4 real-time widgets you can choose from when deciding on how to best visualize your performance data.
There are two ways to create dashboards in Google Analytics: you can create your own dashboard from scratch, or you can use prebuilt Google Analytics dashboard templates.
To create your own custom dashboard in Google Analytics:
1. Log in to Google Analytics.
2. Expand “Customization,” and then click “Dashboards.”
3. Click “CREATE.”
4. Choose “Blank Canvas,” give your dashboard a name, and click “Create Dashboard.”
5. Now, you can build your dashboard by adding widgets to it. Give your widget a title, choose how you want it to display on your dashboard (as a timeline, map, table, chart, etc.), and then add the metrics you want to display in that widget. When you’re finished, click “Save.”
Your new widget will then display on your dashboard. Click “+ Add Widget” to add additional widgets to your dashboard, and continue the process until you’ve created the dashboard you want to use.
But the problem with creating dashboards from scratch in this way is that it requires fairly advanced knowledge of Google Analytics. If you’re just a casual user of the tool, the number of metrics and filters available can be overwhelming, and the interface isn’t terribly intuitive.
So for many people, prebuilt dashboard templates are a better alternative.
To share your dashboard in Google Analytics, simply click the “Share” dropdown on the sub-navigation right above your dashboard.
From here, you’ll have two options:
To address the fact that the process for creating dashboards is confusing to all but the most advanced Google Analytics users, Google created the Solutions Gallery: a place where Google Analytics experts can share their prebuilt dashboard templates with other marketers.
Below, you’ll find 10 of the most popular Google Analytics dashboards from the Solutions Gallery, along with explanations for how to use them, a list of questions each dashboard answers, and links to the templates so you can easily import them to your Google Analytics account.
Dashboard: Traffic Growth Dashboard
Creator: Cemal Buyukgokcesu
Overview: This dashboard will show you which types of visitors are digging deeper into your site. By focusing on both sessions and bounce rate, you can get a good idea on which sources bring quality visitors.
Questions It Answers:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Traffic Growth dashboard below to get a basic picture of your website’s performance and find ideas for how to increase your performance by focusing on the channels that send the highest quality traffic.
Dashboard: Occam’s Razor Awesomeness – VP Digital Dashboard
Creator: Avinash Kaushik
Overview: Avinash Kaushik outlines three major types of metrics you can measure in Google Analytics: acquisition, behavior, and outcomes. This dashboard measures all three types, making it a perfect dashboard for executives who are more interested in overall performance than tactical data.
Questions It Answers:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics VP Digital dashboard below to easily measure your key acquisition, behavior, and outcome metrics and share your real-time dashboard with members of your executive team.
Dashboard: Audience Snapshot
Creator: Loves Data
Overview: This dashboard gives you all the key stats on the types of visitors that arrive on your site. By focusing on demographics, devices, and locations, you get a full picture of your visitor’s context for learning about your product.
Questions It Answers:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Audience Overview dashboard below to get actionable information about the types of people who are visiting your website: where they live, what they’re interested in, and what devices they use most often.
Dashboard: Content Analysis Dashboard
Creator: Vagelis Varfis
Overview: This dashboard looks at the efficiency of your content. It shows you which pages of your site get the most views, which pages drive the most goal conversions, and which pages have the highest number of exits (and may need to be updated with a clearer call-to-action).
Questions It Answers:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Content Analysis dashboard below to track which content on your site does the best job of keeping visitors’ attention—and which need some work.
Dashboard: SEO Dashboard – Finding Top Content and Keywords
Creator: Kevin Pike
Overview: If you want to prioritize your SEO efforts, you need to know which existing pages lead to quality visitors. This dashboard examines the entire process—from search query to page to goal completion. It tells you which organic search terms drive quality traffic.
Questions It Answers:
Suffering from “not provided” keywords? One of the downsides of Google Analytics data is that many keywords show as “not provided.” To get better data, download this free Google Analytics SEO dashboard to combine Google Analytics and Google Search Console data in a single view.
Dashboard: Social Media Dashboard
Creator: Justin Cutroni
Overview: Justin’s dashboard looks at both on-site and off-site social activities. In other words, you will learn which social channels bring quality traffic to the site (i.e. traffic that does not bounce). Once they arrive at your site, you learn whether they stick around to complete specific goals that you have set up.
Questions It Answers:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Social Media dashboard below to easily measure the actions users take after clicking through to your website from social media.
Dashboard: Ecommerce Dashboard
Creator: Blast Analytics & Marketing
Overview: This dashboard looks at customer acquisition for ecommerce. It examines purchasing habits from mobile users and different referral sources. And by looking at product revenue by product, it helps you understand where you need to offer more products.
Questions It Answers:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Product Revenue dashboard below to easily track which channels and devices drive most of your purchases and see a big-picture view of your total transactions, total revenue, and average order value.
Dashboard: New Google Analytics User Starter Bundle – Site Performance Dashboard
Creator: The Google Analytics Team
Overview: This dashboard paints an overall picture of your site’s performance, showing your site’s overall average load times on both web and mobile, load times by browser, and load times for individual pages of your site.
Questions It Answers:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Site Performance dashboard below to easily measure average load speeds for your site overall and by page, browser, country, and type of visitor (new versus returning).
Dashboard: Responsive Design, Mobile Phone and Tablet Dashboard
Creator: Andrew Faulkner
Overview: You’ve hopefully dedicated significant resources to creating an excellent user experience on every device. This dashboard tells you where you are doing a great job and where you need to focus more effort.
Questions It Answers:
Want this dashboard in Databox instead? Grab the free Google Analytics Responsive Design dashboard below to easily measure the user experience for each page of your site on mobile devices.
Dashboard: Goals and Channels Dashboard
Creator: Paul Fervoy
Overview: This dashboard provides you lots of data on the visits that resulted in goal completions. Find out which channels generated the most goal completions, the ages and locations of visitors who completed goals, the pages that drove the most goal completions, and the time of day most goals are completed.
Questions It Answers:
Dashboards in Google Analytics are great when all you need to measure is data that Google Analytics provides. However, few marketers use only Google Analytics to track their performance. Most likely, you need to combine data from Google Analytics with data from the other tools you use.
Databox makes it easy to create and share dashboards that showcase data from both Google Analytics and other popular marketing tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, Facebook, Google Ads, SEMrush, and more. Browse the five example dashboards below, or check out our template gallery to see all of the possible combinations.
Dashboard: Credo’s Marketing KPIs
Creator: Databox
Overview: This dashboard combines data from Mailchimp and Google Analytics so you can see your key website conversion and email marketing engagement metrics side-by-side.
Questions It Answers:
Dashboard: Monthly Marketing Performance
Creator: Databox
Overview: This dashboard combines data from HubSpot Marketing and Google Analytics to provide a complete picture of the monthly performance of your acquisition funnel.
Questions It Answers:
Dashboard: Facebook Ads & Google Ads Dashboard
Creator: Alaniz Marketing
Overview: This dashboard combines data from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads to give you a comprehensive picture of your ad campaign performance.
Questions It Answers:
Dashboard: Conversion & Loyalty Analytics
Creator: Revenue River
Overview: This dashboard combines metrics from both Shopify and Google Analytics to provide sales trend data alongside loyalty metrics.
Questions It Answers:
Dashboard: Wistia + Google Analytics
Creator: Databox
Overview: This dashboard combines data from both Wistia and Google Analytics to give you a complete picture of how your videos are performing on your website.
Questions It Answers:
As you start monitoring your Google Analytics data using dashboards, you may run into some common issues. Here’s how to resolve common issues when working with dashboards in Google Analytics.
After you’ve created your dashboard, you’ll likely want to share it with your leaders, coworkers, or clients. The process of sharing a Google Analytics dashboard is simple:
If you no longer need a Google Analytics dashboard you previously created, follow these steps to delete that dashboard from your account:
If you need to print your dashboard to share it as a hard copy, follow these steps to download the dashboard as a printable PDF:
To embed a Google Analytics dashboard onto your website, you have to build your dashboard using the Google Analytics Embed API. Unfortunately, this requires a fair amount of technical knowledge.
Alternatively, you can create your dashboard in Databox and embed it on your website in just a few clicks. After creating your dashboard or using one of the templates above, hover over the dashboard you want to embed and click the “Share Dashboard” icon.
Next, select the “Embed” tab. Then, all you need to do is copy the displayed embed code and paste it onto your website.
Creating Google Analytics Dashboards in Databox is easy.
Get started by signing up for a free Databox account. After that, you can integrate with up to three other tools, download one of our prebuilt Google Analytics templates, or create your own custom dashboard by adding Datablocks for the other tools you use to track your performance.
Originally published in July 2017, this post has been updated with new information and new dashboards you can use to track your KPIs in both Google Analytics and Databox.
About the author
Thank you!
Analytics | Jan 13
Analytics | Jan 13
Analytics | Jan 12