3 Reasons to leverage Dashboards in Google Analytics

Tony Fazzini - June 12, 2017

Dashboards are a great tool in Google Analytics, but what are the best uses for a Dashboard?

In most cases, dashboards are ideal to build basic reports that you would like to see on an on-going basis.  Here are three reasons why dashboards are a great feature to utilize in Google Analytics:

1. Easy to compile reports from several sections

   Instead of having to look for multiple reports throughout your account, you can easily navigate to one dashboard and review all of the different reports that you want to see.  You can have conversion based reports, behavior (landing page, time on site, etc.) reports, and even acquisition reports (top mediums that brought traffic, etc.) all in one view.  If you see something within one of the reports that you’d like to review further, simply click into that section of Google Analytics and drill down into the data as needed.

2. Customize Date Ranges and Trends

   In a dashboard you’re still able to customize the data range and even compare date ranges to view your data.  This is very helpful as it’ll allow you to be flexible on how you’re reviewing data based on the reporting you would like to produce.  It’s important to note that not all reports in a dashboard will work well with date range comparisons so you’ll want to review the reports and the layouts prior to finalizing your dashboard to ensure it’s displaying properly.

3. Saves Time

   Since all the top level reports are available from one view, this is a huge times saver!  You won’t need to go into every section of the website and look for the information you want from each section over and over again.  This can save you 30 minutes easily every time you log-in to Google Analytics to review reporting from each section.  In addition, it’ll save you time from drilling down unnecessarily because you can see the high level information and choose which reports need more time spent analyzing further.