Custom dashboards in google analytics allow you to group your reports so you can see anything that you would want to report to in one place. This could be to see all related reports in one place, such as a social media dashboard that tells you more about the visitors coming from social media platforms to your website. This could also be a dashboard for a specific function such as a weekly report dashboard that has all the numbers that you report on in one place.
In this example, I am going to build a social media dashboard that shows you all your visitors that are coming from social media in one place.
Firstly you will need to go to Google Analytics, Dashboards, and select Create. You will be asked if you would like a blank canvas or a starter dashboard. You are going to select a blank canvas. Click on create dashboard.
In the top left-hand corner, you are going to need to select new widget.
In this widget, we are wanting to show the number of users that have come from social media in the given time frame. By default, the widget will open with Metric selected. We are going to want to leave this selected as we want to show the actual number of users. Under, Show the following metric: you are going to need to select Users then add a filter. By default, Only Show will be selected you can leave this selected. In the dimension field, you will need to search for Social Source Referral. Change the field Containing to Exact Match and in the text box type Yes.
The definition of Social Source Referal is: Whether or not this activity resulted from a social source.
Click Save. You now should be showing, as a number, users from social sources.
You can follow the same process as above and build the additional widgets for this dashboard.
1) Users from social by country – Map
2) Users by social network – Pie
3) Sessions & bounce rate from social – Timeline
4) Sessions & bounce rate – Table