Custom Reporting in Google Analytics
Custom Reporting in Google Analytics
Custom Reporting in Google Analytics
Back in late 2008, Google announced several enterprise-class features that were added to Google Analytics. These served to further enhance Analytics' customisation and functionality for power-users. One of these new features was Custom Reporting.
Custom Reports essentially enable you to create your own metrics dashboard, quickly and easily. This allows for meaningful and customised analysis. They are most useful when you want to combine metrics with dimensions that are not already combined in other reports.
At this point, it's worth distinguishing between metrics and dimensions:
Metrics (which form the columns in your reports) are a quantitative measure of how visitors interact with your site. These include things like visits, pageviews and bounce rate. Metrics will always have a numerical value, and this is the major distinction between metrics and dimensions.
Dimensions (the rows in the report) are almost always text. These define a particular characteristic of a visitor or page to allow you to better organise your metrics. Examples include "new" or "returning", "cape town" etc.
But how will Custom Reports help me?
By creating Custom Reports, you can easily group together metrics and dimensions that are most important or relevant to you and your analysis. This allows you more flexibility in how you analyze your reports, as well as centralising data from multiple reports on Google Analytics in one location.
In addition to pulling together metrics from a number of reports in one place, you can add multiple dimension layers (sub-dimensions) which then allow you to drilldown as far as five levels deep. You are able to specify the order depending on how you arrange these dimensions.
Another great feature is that you are then able to share these Custom Reports with colleagues. This saves time and enables far more accurate dissection and segmentation of data. It also means that it's possible to build reports for specific purposes, saving time and effort for colleagues or clients who are perhaps not used to working with Analytics. It enables them to see the data that's important to them, quickly and easily.
How do I create Custom Reports in Google Analytics?
As with all things Google, Custom Reports are very easy to set up.
Begin by clicking the Custom Reporting button on the left hand navigation on your dashboard in your Google Analytics account. You'll see a drop down of the previous Custom Reports you've created and saved (if any). Click on "Manage Custom Reports" and you'll be able to edit, share or delete existing Custom Reports. To create a new report, click on "Create new custom report" on the top right of the screen.
Now you simply populate the metrics and dimensions fields by dragging items from the lists on the left.
According to the Google blog, "You can choose any metric to build your custom report with. You also don't have to pair them with dimensions, which means there are no restrictions to which metrics you can use. However, when they are paired with dimensions, metrics are subject to certain restrictions. Please see this chart to understand which metric and dimension pairings are possible when designing a custom report.
This is important to bear in mind. It also means that when you're planning your report, you need to think carefully about what dimensions you want to show within the metrics, as this will determine how you set up the report.
As a practical example, let's say you want to see where your conversions are coming from both in terms of medium, source and geographic location.
To set this up, expand the "Goals" tab in the metrics menu. Drag and drop the relevant "Goal Completions" metrics into the spaces provided (up to 10). These will form the columns in your report and show the total number of completed goals.
Now, the order of your dimension is important, as this will determine how you'll drilldown into your report. In the dimensions menu, expand the "Traffic Sources" tab and drag the "Medium" dimension into the first slot on the report. This shows the medium that directed the visits to your site (e.g. organic, CPC, direct and so forth). These will be reflected in the rows of the report. Now, if you test this report, you will immediately see how many goals were completed, split into referrals from each medium.
You could segment this further by adding a drilldown dimension. In this case, let's move "Source" into the next space. This will allow you to click onto a "Medium" and the report (which will retain the specified metrics) will then show you the sources under that medium. So for example, if the medium was "organic", the sources may be "google", "bing" and "yahoo".
Now, if you're interested in seeing which visitors arrived via an organic medium (specifically Google) and completed a goal on your site, you'd add another dimension: "Region", for example, which will be found under the "Visitors" tab. Now, you're able to use this Custom Report to easily see where your conversions are coming from - both by medium and source, as well as by geographic region.
Name your Custom Report and save it to easily apply it to data in your Google Analytics account. That in a nutshell is how to create Custom Reports on Google Analytics.
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