Hi friends 👋🏻

Early this month Google Analytics released a new dashboard-building feature. At the time of the announcement, most GA properties didn't have access, so I've paused on writing about it until the rollout was closer to complete.

When I checked in again today, I see the Dashboards feature announced in almost all of my clients' Google Analytics properties, so let's take a look!

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Want to make a simple dashboard in Google Analytics?

Now you can. (And yes, it would have been lovely if this was present back in 2023 when were all adopting GA4. Better three years late than never ...?)

Go fire up your Google Analytics property today and you'll probably see a Discover Dashboards promo on the home page.

You can create a dashboard there, or from the new Create button that lives in the top-left of the Reports page:

The fastest way to learn what you can do here is to give it a test drive. Think about a few example data points that you are asked about frequently (or ask yourself), and try building a dashboard to save in you Reports.

To guide you, check out this helpful overview video from Benjamin Mangold, who runs the excellent Analytics YouTube channel Loves Data. (It's true, he really does love data.)

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What's the benefit of a Google Analytics dashboard?

I see a few big benefits here, depending on your circumstances:

• For simple dashboards, you can avoid using Google Analytics much more complicated "Explorations" feature, which many users find incredibly complicated to set up and share, while staying within the Google Analytics interface.
• If you're only reporting on Google Analytics data, this feature might reduce your need for external tools (like Data Studio) to build simple website analytics reports.
• You can share these dashboards within anyone else that has at least view access to the GA property (but you need to have Editor or Admin permissions to create and publish them).

If you need a simple report covering top website traffic sources, or trends in specific key events, these dashboards will be a great fit.

Here's a link to Google's documentation about the Dashboards functionality.

Go experiment and let me know what you can build!

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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