How To Create And Share Custom Reports In Google Analytics?

Gordon Choi
Author

Chapter 12 – Google Analytics Custom Reports
- Why are Custom Reports Useful?
- Create A New Custom Report
- Custom Report Example
- Share A Custom Report

Analytics

In Google Analytics, you have access to many standard and pre-built reports. But often you will need reports that haven’t been built.

One Solution is to create your own Custom Reports.

Why are Custom Reports Useful?

But why would you need a custom report or any custom report at all?

Most (if not all) reports in Google Analytics would show one dimension per report. For example, you have a report with a single dimension of Source/Medium against metrics such as Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate, etc.

But for you to segment and analyze your data, you’ll need to put multiple dimensions such as source/medium landing page, location, device type, etc in a single report. And this is exactly custom reports can do.

This is how you can quickly create a new custom report.

Create A New Custom Report

Under your Google Analytics property, go to:

View -> Customization -> +New Custom Report

Enter a report name in the Name field.
Choose Flat Table as Type.

For Metric Groups, select from +add metric:

Sessions
Page Views
% New Sessions
Bounce Rate
Transactions
Any Goal you have previous set up and are also important to be included in regular reports.

For Dimension drill-downs, select from +add dimension:

Date
Landing Page

Assume you want to a custom report containing only organic search data. To filter / restrict the report to show only organic search data.

medium = organic

To filter restrict the report to show only organic search data from Baidu.

medium = organic
source = baidu

Alternatively, combine the dimensions into one.

source/medium = baidu / organic

Custom Report Example

A typical Custom Report that is created through this method may have rows and columns like the format below.

Date	Landing Page	Sessions	Page Views	% New Sessions	Bounce Rate	Transactions
April 1, 2016	/index.php	500	2533	37%	62%	7
April 2, 2016	/fruits/	123	870	31%	59%	2
April 3, 2016	/candies/	68	293	42%	57%	0

Previous Chapters

Chapter 11 – Track New Search Engines through Google Analytics

Next Chapters

Chapter 13 – Google Analytics Self Referrals
Chapter 14 – Google Analytics Sampled Data
Chapter 15 – Google Mobile App Analytics

Content on Gordon Choi’s Analytics Book is licensed under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International license.

Gordon Choi’s Other Books:
The China Mobile SEO Book
Mobile Website Book

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