Google Analytics is a user-friendly analysis tool that provides you with insightful data to monitor the traffic on your website. With Google Analytics reports, you can track who visits your website and how long they stay. You can also see if they return to your website.
Still, you need to customize Google Analytics to leverage its full potential. We’ll look at 15 ways to do so.
1. Customize How You View Your Data
Google Analytics offers multiple methods to view data. Besides the basic tabular and line graph format, you can customize Google Analytics to enable advanced data visualization.
If you connect your Google Analytics account with Google Data Studio, you can analyze your data through advanced charts and graphs. Data Studio provides bar charts, pie charts, and geo maps.
The exploration feature of Google Analytics 4 will help you derive deep data insights. You can analyze user groups based on behavioral metrics. The exploration menu also has options for comparing user segments and analyzing a user in depth.
2. Create a Custom Dashboard
Customizing your dashboards enables you to view the metrics that matter the most to you all in one place. Choose the metrics you want to see and organize them in a way that makes sense to you.
You can customize Google Analytics to view crucial metrics such as:
- Total traffic
- Source of traffic
- Session duration
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
3. Import a Dashboard Template
If you don’t feel like creating your custom dashboards, you can import one from a wide range of Google Analytics dashboard templates.
Here are a few popular custom templates:
- Traffic growth dashboard
- Audience snapshot
- Search engine optimization (SEO) dashboard
4. Use More Than One Dashboard
You have many amazing customizable dashboards in Google Analytics. You don’t have to choose one. You can use separate custom dashboards to monitor different types of data.
You can use multiple dashboards to monitor:
- Website traffic
- Social media and digital marketing results
- Pageviews and keyword performance
5. Add Custom Widgets
When customizing your dashboards, don’t forget to include custom pies, tables, or timeline widgets besides basic metrics. You can have up to 12 widgets in each of your Analytics dashboards.
6. Send Dashboard Metrics To Email
To track how the metrics on your dashboards change over time, send them to your email regularly.
You can export Google Analytics data as PDF and schedule it to be emailed at specific intervals.
7. Create Custom Reports
Google Analytics custom reports help you generate deep insights into your online business. You have several types of reports in google analytics, such as:
- Acquisition reports that show all the sources of your website traffic
- Behavior reports that show how your visitors interact with your website
- Conversion reports that help you track your traffic and marketing goals
8. Import Custom Reports
As with custom dashboards, you can import certain types of custom reports. Using the custom report templates will help you save time.
Check out the popular custom reports templates.
9. Create Scheduled Reports
Once you have decided on the reports you need, you can automatically create them. You can schedule the creation of custom reports and receive the results via email.
10. Adjust Date Ranges
When viewing any metric or report generated by Google Analytics, you can set the dates for which you want the data. Custom date ranges help you view both short-term and long-term results. You can also compare data from two date ranges.
11. Set Up E-Commerce Tracking
If you own an e-commerce website, Google Analytics’s e-commerce tracking will help you capture your revenue data.
You can customize Google Analytics to capture e-commerce key performance indicators (KPIs), such as:
- Average order value
- Time to purchase
- Revenue by traffic sources
12. Connect Google Analytics to Google AdSense
If you have a Google AdSense account, you can link it to Google Analytics to monitor your revenue from Google Ads.
There are many benefits to linking the accounts. It helps you:
- Identify the revenue-generating pages on your website
- Pin-point locations where most of your revenue come from
- Recognize the keywords that generate the highest revenue
13. Monitor Conversions
Depending on your website’s purpose, conversions may occur when a user makes a purchase, signs up for an account, or fills out a form for more information about a product or service.
Google Analytics lets you define a set of actions that constitute a goal and monitor your performance against it using the Goals feature.
14. Set Other Goals
Besides monitoring conversions, you can also use Google Analytics’s goal feature for other purposes. You can measure your performance in the following areas:
- Pageviews
- Downloads
- Email sign up
15. Customize Alerts
You can get alerts from Google Analytics on several events affecting the performance of your website. For example, you can create a custom alert whenever your daily website traffic falls below a certain threshold.
Custom alerts help you be on top of the website issues and fix them quickly.
Final Thoughts: 15 Ways To Customize Google Analytics for Better Insights
Google Analytics is constantly rolling out new features to improve user experience. When you notice a new option, play around with it to see if it’s something you can use.
Customizing this tool for maximum effectiveness may be challenging if you’re new to Google Analytics. You can try Google Analytics plugins for WordPress. If you need professional help, check out Bluehost’s managed WordPress services today.
