You may have noticed that some out-of-the-box reports in Google Analytics don’t give you the exact information you are looking for. This situation is about to disappear. With the arrival of custom reports and the possibility for creating advanced segments, you now have a complete toolbox to create the reports you need.
Building your own reports
The concept is relatively simple: With custom reports you built the same result tables as you already have available in Google Analytics, but you determine metrics and dimensions of the table. And you also decide how you want to drill down on your results.
Dimension and metrics, what are they?
Google explains dimensions and metrics by giving small examples:
- Dimensions are segments like browser and browser version, country, landing and exit pages, the URL or title of a page, and the source website a visitor has come from.
- Metrics are the counts of a dimension for specific data types, such as counts of new visitors, page views, unique page views and so on.
Defining your metrics
With custom reports, you can define up to 10 metrics per tab, or in other words, each report can contain as many metrics you wish, as long you separate them into different tabs. Of course, the more data you have available the more you can measure: If you have setup goals or campaigns, do online advertising or configured you site as an e-commerce site, you will get a lot more information with your reports.
Simply drag and drop your dimensions in the blue squares...
Choosing your dimension
Here's where it gets really interesting, because you can not only choose one dimension, but also decide which way you want to drill down in your information. For example, you could create a custom report similar to the existing "Map Overlay" with "countries" as first dimension, but select not region and city, but rather to "traffic sources" as a second dimension.
Or you could do the opposite, and using "traffic sources" as first and "countries" as second dimension.
... and do the same for your desired dimensions
The result
As described above, depending on the order of your dimesions, you get a different look at your data. In our example we can now see traffic sources for each unique country. And if you switch the dimensions you can get a country ranking for each traffic source, which allows you i.e. to compare your search engine traffic in different countries.
Custom reports deliver information the way you want to see them.
And it becomes even more interesting when you apply advanced segments to your custom reports. This topic is covered on the next post.