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Google Analytics offers endless opportunities to its user so that they can analyze their website traffic on various dimensions & create plans, marketing strategies or measure their campaign success.
One of the best modules of google analytics is to create custom reports where you can customize reports according to their need. You can pick any dimension like device, location, platform, age & lot more along with the metrics like page views, landing page, sessions, bounce rates, etc to decide how you want to view the data & import to an effective report for you.
It’s not necessary to create a custom report but if you are working on any marketing plan, I would recommend you to create one so that you don’t need to navigate to the various tabs of google analytics to see the traffic, conversion & session insights.
When you use google analytics custom reports, you will select which insights you want to see & get help to improve your website traffic, conversions (sales or leads).
In this article, you will learn how you can create an effective custom report, choose dimensions which you can use for analysis & get the best out of it.
Step 1: Setup New Custom Report
Start creating your custom report by login into Google Analytics » Customization » Custom Reports.
Next, click on + New Custom Report.
Once you click on + New Custom Report, it will ask you about what name you want to have for your report. You can pick any name here which you find suitable & easy to differentiate among other reports.
Step 2: Select a Custom Report Type
Once you name your custom report, the next step is to choose the report type you want to create. By default, Google Analytics custom report has one tag created with the default name “Report Tab”. You can also rename it as per your understanding.
I renamed mine Sessions by Country as I want to see the traffic coming to my website from various countries.
After you name your tab, there are three reports types & you need to choose as per your need:
- Explorer. This is a very basic Google Analytics custom report. It includes a graph & table with dynamic things like a search and sort option along with the secondary dimensions.
- Flat Table. This custom report is static and has a sortable table that shows data in rows.
- Map Overlay. If you want to view the data in maps, this is the report type which you should choose. It shows you a map of the world including countries in darker colors when there is traffic or site engagement.
I’ve chosen Explorer as I want to view the data in graphs & tables. This looks pretty good compared to the other two report types.
Step 3: Define the Custom Report Metrics
Let’s move ahead to the next step.
After you choose your report type, you need to define the custom report matric. Here you can select from the wide options from Metrics, I searched & chosen Sessions because I want to set a report where I can see the sessions from various countries.
Now select the Dimension from the list, in my case I’ve chosen Country.
Step 4: Add a Filter
This step in completely optional but very important. When you create any report, there may be some spam /irrelevant or other data which you do not want to include in the report. It let you restrict the data to show it.
Just click on + add filter & choose the one(s) you do not want to include in your custom report.
Once you choose any filter, hit save.
After you save the report, your custom report is ready to view like this.
This was a very basic report which we have created. You can choose any metric or dimension along with multiple tabs & filters.
You need to explore more to check how you want your report to be made.
View The Report
When you come next time to view the report, you need to follow the same action path Google Analytics » Customization » Custom Reports & select the name of your customer to repot (Mine was My Custom Report).
Conclusion
Google Analytics offers various opportunity to view/compile your website data. You can improve your website visibility by analyzing this data & create strategy according to it.
The best part of this is, it’s completely free & you can access a lot of features of it.
Let us know if we have missed anything here in a comment so that we can include it in the next blog.
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Thanks Vin.