Save Some Time with Google Analytics Keyboard Shortcuts

Grant Marlowe - March 8, 2016

In this blog post we will cover a topic that everyone is interested in: saving time! Keyboard shortcuts help save time when you are frequently toggling between two different tabs, functions, tools etc. For example, in Photoshop, rather than dragging your mouse ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE SCREEN (phew how exhausting) to change from “paintbrush” to a “color selector” tool, you can instead use a keystroke and switch to your color selector instantly.

While many computer programs and applications offer keyboard shortcuts, it has come to my attention that not many people are aware that there are some useful shortcuts available in the Google Analytics (GA) interface. There are several shortcuts that can be used in GA to access different reports, adjust the date range, toggle the help menu, and more. In this blog post, the keyboard shortcuts that are currently available in Google Analytics are divided into two sections: Application shortcuts and Date Range shortcuts.

Let’s first focus on some of the helpful Application shortcuts:

Load default dashboard: SHIFT + D

We all know how useful GA dashboards can be for getting an “at a glance” view of some of the metrics we frequently examine. If you find yourself forgetting where the dashboard section of GA is, or you are constantly viewing it throughout the day and want quick access, on your keyboard hold the SHIFT key and press the letter “d”. This will tell Google Analytics to load the default dashboard, without having to go through the exhausting effort of maneuvering through the navigation menu and loading it.

Open Account Panel: “a”

Another great GA shortcut is useful if you work between several different accounts, properties and views in Google Analytics, instead of going back to the Home tab, if we select the letter “a” on our keyboard an Account Panel will open up allowing us to select a different view, property or account all from within the current report we are viewing.

This next shortcut saves me the most time and is hands-down my favorite. What if I told you that you could switch between any of the Google Analytics Standard Reports without touching your mouse?

Switch between recently viewed reports: “s”

While in the Reporting section of GA hit the letter “s” one time, this will allow you to do two things.
1) Type in the report you wish to view by inputting the path to that specific report (ex. Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths).  2) Open up any of the reports you have recently viewed, so if you’re like me and view a report, change to a different report and then go back to your first report… hit the “s” key and save yourself some time.

Let’s now run through some of the keyboard shortcuts available for changing the Date Range:

The Date Range Selector is super easy to use and offers a variety of ways to specify the desired time frame. Analysts will often be reviewing different reports and want to adjust the time frame to understand how users behave over different periods of time. There are several keyboard shortcuts available for changing the date range without having to use your mouse.

A common time frame for analyzing activity is the past 30 days view, and rather than adjusting the Date Range Selector we can hit the key’s “d, 3, 0” and GA will adjust the date range to the past 30 days and load our report to show data for this timeframe.

If we want to look at data for only the past 7 days we can select “d, 7” on our keyboard and GA will adjust the date range to show the past 7 days and reload the report accordingly.

Similarly if we want to view activity for just today, we can hit “d, t” and Google Analytics will populate our report with the data we have collected for just today.

One last keyboard shortcut that can be used to modify the Date Selector is “d, x.” This shortcut will load whatever date range we have selected and add on the “Compare To Previous Year” function so we can see trends from the current date range compared to last year’s performance during this time frame. For example, if we were looking at the Mobile Overview report for the month of March and we wanted to compare it to March of the previous year, we can hit “d, x” and GA will load March of this year vs. March of last year into our Mobile report!

The keyboard shortcuts available in Google Analytics are helpful for navigating through different reports, switching over to a different account, modifying your date range and completing many other useful tasks. For a list of all the shortcuts available in Google Analytics hit “?”. The above shortcuts should help you navigate through Google Analytics a little quicker and might even get some of your colleagues to say “Whoa! How did you do that?”