Did you know that you can create a variety of custom reports in Google Analytics? The benefit of this is that you can view certain metrics against other metrics in one report. You can even take this a step further and put everything into an excel document to slice and dice the data in any way you want. Let’s get started on how to do this!
Custom Dashboard
Here is a report that I already created. If this is your first report, you will need to click where the arrow is pointing too.
This is an example of what you will see if this is your first report.
This is what I created.
Within the new custom report section, you pretty much have the sky as the limit in what you want to look at. For this report, I wanted to focus on a few areas that I wanted to learn more about with sessions (visits) for my site.
What are the Dimensions in the Custom Reports?
The dimensions are what you viewing the metrics for. With just sessions on the metric tab, I am looking at total visits to my website. By adding multiple dimensions to this custom report, I can look at things like by hour, by day of week, what the device is, and much more for sessions.
If you ever want to change any dimension, you can simply click on the green tab and you will be presented with a plethora of options to look at.
How to Export the Report to Excel?
Once the report looks good, you can simply save the report. You will then presented the raw data based on the time range you are looking at. Based on how big your data is, you might need to break out this report in smaller chunks as Google Analytics can only show 5,000 rows of data. As a note, you can have smaller report by having less dimensions. Once you are ready to export this report, you will head over to where the red arrow is below.
The data will then be presented to you in a raw spreadsheet format. I would suggest taking the data and put it all into a pivot table to view everything a bit better.
How to Email a Scheduled Custom Report in Google Analytics
You can also schedule this report to your email address. Right next to export, you can click on the email button. From there, you will be given a few options like how often you would like the report. For this report, I have it set to the first of the month. This can be a great option if you are working in an agency and your client would like to look at a custom dashboard for their account. Google Analytics can be overwhelming at times, so these reports help everyone view the same metrics.