How To Build Your Own Custom Google Analytics Dashboard

Digging out all of the essential web site knowledge from Google Analytics 4 might be difficult when you don’t know what to search for or the way to navigate the platform. Fortunately, new, customized, or exterior GA4 dashboards is perhaps the precise resolution you’ve been looking for.

Right here’s the way to minimize by the noise and optimize your website round essentially the most related net metrics effortlessly.

What Is a Google Analytics 4 Dashboard?

A Google Analytics 4 dashboard organizes your key web site metrics and KPIs right into a single, simply digestible view.

It helps you perceive the place guests are coming from, analyze visitors channels, enhance underperforming pages, A/B take a look at web page variants, and create methods to construct your on-line presence. You possibly can both use real-time knowledge widgets or historic knowledge with charts, maps, and pie graphs.

There are three normal kinds of GA4 dashboards:

1. Prepared-made Explorations—These are current GA4 dashboard templates accessible instantly from inside the GA4 platform. Explorations differ from Looker Studio, which is a Google-hosted atmosphere the place actual customers can create and share GA4 dashboards without spending a dime.
2. Customized Explorations—These are customized GA4 dashboards you can also make fully from scratch.
3. Exterior GA4 dashboards—These are pre-made, GA4-compatible dashboards sourced from third-party platforms like Analytics Mates and DashThis. They arrive as both free or paid templates, and most are absolutely appropriate with Looker Studio.

In GA4, Dashboards, Stories, and Explorations are principally synonymous, with Explorations providing a extra in-depth data analysis than the opposite two.

Tips on how to Create a Google Analytics 4 Dashboard (Step-by-Step)

Right here’s the way to create a brand new exploration, which primarily serves as a dashboard equal in GA4:

1. Register to your GA4 account.

2. Choose your most popular property.

3. Navigate to Discover from the left-hand menu.

4. Click on the plus icon to create a clean exploration, or select one from the accessible templates. In accordance with the latest Google guidelines, explorations assist the next visible codecs and strategies:

• Free-form exploration—Reveals knowledge in a crosstab structure, together with choices equivalent to line charts, pie charts, bar charts, scatter plots, and geo maps.
• Cohort exploration—Creates teams of customers who share frequent attributes.
• Funnel exploration—Tracks the steps customers take to finish a desired motion in your web site or app.
• Section overlap—Makes use of Venn diagrams to indicate commonalities between totally different consumer teams.
• Consumer explorer—Creates a complete report of consumer segments and particular person customers.
• Path exploration—Visualizes how customers navigate by your website’s pages.
• Consumer lifetime—Analyzes consumer actions all through their whole lifetime as your clients.

5. Along with these strategies, the Template Gallery additionally enables you to choose a Use Case template (e.g., Acquisition, Key Occasions, Consumer Habits) or an Industries template (e.g., Ecommerce, Gaming).

6. Within the Variables part, choose your most popular Metrics and Dimensions. You possibly can apply as much as 20 filters and 20 segments per exploration to additional refine your knowledge.

7. When you’re achieved customizing, click on the down arrow within the top-right nook to export your exploration. Google Analytics 4 helps the next export codecs: Google Sheets, TSV, CSV, and PDF.

Finest Google Analytics 4 Dashboard Templates (Free & Paid)

Right here’s a fast roundup of the most effective GA4 dashboard templates accessible at this time, together with why they’re good and ideas for utilizing them successfully.

1. Paid Media Dashboard Template by Portermetrics.com

Pricing: $12.5/month for a single linked account.

The Paid Media Dashboard Template, courtesy of Portermetrics.com, gives entrepreneurs with an in depth marketing campaign overview throughout main platforms equivalent to Google Adverts, Fb Adverts, TikTok Adverts, and LinkedIn Adverts. It seamlessly integrates GA4 knowledge (together with paid media metrics), enabling customers to watch clicks, impressions, conversion charges, click-through charges (CTR), and advert spend effectivity in a single hub.

The dashboard template is straightforward to hook up with your different paid media accounts. Merely head on over to the official template page and observe the step-by-step directions offered by the Porter crew. You can too obtain your studies as PDFs by choosing the specified date vary and selecting the precise report pages you need to save to your system.

2. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Dashboard Template on Power BI by Windsor.ai

Pricing: 

• Free for a single consumer and supporting as much as three knowledge sources.
• Skilled tier priced at $499/month, supporting as much as 14 knowledge sources and 500 accounts.

This template completely encapsulates a contemporary GA4 dashboard for Energy BI (Microsoft’s knowledge analytics and visualization platform), providing sturdy, sturdy visualization capabilities in a transparent, easy-to-comprehend association. Customers get entry to key metrics equivalent to engagement charges, visitors sources, and conversion funnels, all sourced with actual knowledge syncing by Windsor.ai’s proprietary connector. The consumer interface is intuitive and simple to navigate, distilling complicated GA4 knowledge into digestible visible chunks.

In idea, the template is free. For bigger web sites, nonetheless, you’ll seemingly must create an account and subscribe to one of many accessible paid plans. In any other case, you may end up lacking out on important info in the course of the knowledge inhabitants section whereas connecting your GA4 and Energy BI accounts.

3. Website Conversions Report by Coefficient.com

Pricing:

• Free for a single consumer, supporting as much as three knowledge sources, a 5,000-row import dimension restrict, and a 100-row export dimension restrict.
• Professional tier priced at $99/month, supporting as much as six knowledge sources with limitless import and export sheet sizes.

Coefficient’s Web site Conversion Report is an easy, simple, and fashionable GA4-compatible dashboard that hyperlinks all of your reside knowledge to Google Sheets and Excel by way of the platform’s trademark Related Spreadsheets. It affords entrepreneurs lightning-fast accuracy with zero code, with out the steep studying curve present in less-refined templates. You can too customise your metrics to finest suit your wants, making it a wonderful selection for each small companies and mid-level organizations.

To obtain the template, go to Coefficient’s official page, click on Get Free Template, enter your e-mail, and choose Use Template. Subsequent, join your Google Workspace, GA4, or Microsoft account, and choose between robotically or manually connecting your reside knowledge. Whereas the dashboard itself is free, there’s a restricted variety of sheet export sizes, so massive corporations ought to take into account buying one of many paid plans to unlock its full vary of capabilities.

4. Google Analytics 4 Dashboard Template for Marketers by Adriel.com

Pricing:

• Newbie tier priced at $500/month, that includes as much as 5 customers, 5 dashboards, and assist for greater than 25 advert accounts.
• Entry to the Skilled tier prices $1,500/month and consists of as much as 20 customers, limitless dashboards, and helps greater than 100 advert accounts.

Adriel’s main purpose is to cut back the pointless complexity of GA4 studies right into a single, handy, and beginner-friendly platform. The Google Analytics 4 Dashboard Template for Entrepreneurs affords an intuitive drag-and-drop builder that permits you to visualize key metrics, together with consumer engagement, visitors sources, and marketing campaign objectives, throughout a number of platforms with out having to wrestle with studying an advanced setup. Every particular person component is absolutely customizable, guaranteeing the info output matches the wants of the supposed stakeholders.

Adriel’s ready-made GA4 dashboards are supreme when you plan to create particular views for various shopper teams or inside groups. For instance, you possibly can spin up a conversion-focused view for the advertising and marketing division, a paid social media view for the social media crew, and an in depth web analytics view for the C-suite crew—all inside a single template. The one downside is that accessing Adriel’s GA4 templates requires a minimal subscription of $500 monthly.

5. GA4 Report Template by Dashthis.com

Pricing:

• You possibly can check out the corporate’s 15-day free trial, which unlocks entry for as much as 10 dashboards in whole.
• Paid plans begin with the Particular person tier at $42/month and go all the best way as much as the Commonplace tier at $409/month.

The GA4 Report Template by DashThis is crafted with multi-channel analytics in thoughts, permitting a seamless KPI aggregation with only a few clicks and no coding data required. It affords wealthy visualization choices (pie graphs, gauge charts, stacked column lists), versatile widgets, and sturdy white label branding options. DashThis’s template additionally easily integrates with main digital analytics platforms equivalent to Moz, Ahrefs, and Semrush.

This atmosphere excels in its updating and sharing capabilities, providing automated template updates and instantaneous sharing by way of reside hyperlinks, e-mail, or downloads. Its UI instrument is each versatile and quick, whereas the corporate’s buyer assist is useful and responsive. Sadly, the free tier solely permits entry for 15 days, leaving a lot to be desired for startups and people on a decent funds.

For an entire have a look at the bottom GA4 studies, verify our Google Analytics 4 Beginner’s Guide.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Dashboards: What’s Totally different?

Google Analytics 4 and Common Analytics dashboards look and function pretty equally on the floor, however there are nonetheless some nuanced variations between the 2 that set them aside. With that stated, since UA has already been completely sundown, it’s actually inconceivable to entry its dashboards—even when you needed to.

These have been the important thing variations between UA and GA4 (dashboard- and reporting-wise) whereas UA was nonetheless round:

1. UA tracked knowledge classes and pageviews, whereas GA4 data each consumer interplay as an occasion.
2. UA reported the full variety of customers, whereas GA4 focuses on lively customers.
3. UA separated net and app knowledge. GA4 tracks these metrics beneath the identical property.
4. UA was targeted on bounce price, whereas GA4 emphasizes engagement price.
5. UA used to have distinct classes (e.g., Acquisition, Viewers, Habits, and Conversion sections), whereas GA4 drops these studies in favor of Engagement and Monetization—with fewer presets.
6. UA had fastened classes. GA4 permits better flexibility, which generally butts heads with the platform’s personal performance.
7. UA’s dashboards and studies was extra intuitive. GA4 jumbled the UI unnecessarily, inflicting folks to search for viable Google Analytics 4 alternatives.

Suggestions and Methods to Get the Most Out of Your Dashboards

Google Analytics 4 could be a complicated atmosphere when you’re brand-new to the platform or when you’re making an attempt to juggle a number of incompatible metrics without delay—equivalent to monitoring social media spend, recording all potential browser variations, or digging into common engagement time with out making use of the correct context.

Listed here are a handful of helpful ideas to assist optimize your GA4 reporting workflow with out dropping focus.

Choose a well-liked and highly-rated dashboard template

Simply because one thing is in style doesn’t all the time imply it’s of fine high quality. On this case, nonetheless, it really does. In digital advertising and marketing, customers usually flock towards top-rated themes from reliable builders and confirmed manufacturers, minimizing the dangers earlier than making a expensive long-term dedication to a specific SaaS tool.

Some dashboard-hosting platforms have a big presence on software program evaluation websites like Getapp or Capterra. Verify the model for optimistic buyer opinions, then seek for a particular dashboard template you want and see what persons are saying about it, together with constructive suggestions. If it’s rated extremely by a big chunk of its consumer base, go for it. If not, there’s seemingly cause why.

In abstract, select in style, highly-rated, and prominently-reviewed dashboard templates, and check out avoiding obscure templates with little to no opinions, low consumer scores, or unknown creators.

Determine your online business’s key occasions

In GA4, any occasion can turn into a key occasion, however that doesn’t imply that it must be. Key occasions are important actions customers endure in your website that drive outcomes, equivalent to shopping for a product, downloading a lead magnet, or submitting contact info. Relying in your area of interest and objectives, take into account organising these occasions as key occasions, making them simpler to trace shifting ahead. Right here’s how.

First, navigate to Admin, Occasions.

Subsequent, click on the star in entrance of the occasion you need to select as your key occasion.

Be very selective together with your selections, and don’t hesitate to take away a key occasion if it doesn’t show essential for your online business objectives.

Overview your dashboards frequently

GA4 dashboards solely work when you verify them frequently and alter based mostly on consumer actions from the previous interval. Think about reviewing them weekly and performing an in-depth evaluation on essentially the most impactful metrics recognized within the earlier step of your knowledge monitoring workflow.

That is essential for a number of causes. First, it provides you the chance to note developments early on and act whereas the proverbial iron continues to be sizzling. For example, you may see a sudden uptick in cart abandonment rate. Or, you may discover that your in style pages are receiving much less visitors than regular, a discovery that will warrant a technical website evaluation. Or, you may discover a discrepancy between your Google Search Console (GSC) knowledge and GA4 knowledge, offering a possibility to repair any syncing errors and forestall even larger points down the highway.

Automate alerts

Think about organising alerts to robotically ship studies at common intervals to all related stakeholders. In GA4, you possibly can create alerts by way of the Insights function. 

First, sort “insights” within the GA4 search bar and choose the matching end result.

Then, click on Create to create a brand new perception.

You possibly can both select from GA4’s current insights or create a customized perception from scratch.

Uplevel Your Dashboards with Looker Studio

Looker Studio, previously referred to as Google Information Studio, is a free Google Cloud-hosted instrument that permits customers to supercharge their static GA4 knowledge into interactive, colourful, and simply digestible dashboards. It integrates seamlessly with most Google merchandise, equivalent to Google Sheets, Google Drive, GA4, BigQuery, YouTube Analytics, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and third-party platforms like Fb, Amazon Redshift, and Microsoft SQL Server for a streamlined advertising and marketing analytics and knowledge administration expertise.

This full integration removes the necessity for handbook reporting, changing spreadsheets with real-time, ready-made dashboards that allow sooner decision-making when it issues most. Non-technical customers may also profit from Looker Studio by utilizing Google’s intensive connector library with minimal or no coding data.

In different phrases, Looker Studio makes your Google Analytics 4 studies visually higher. 

As an finish consumer, you possibly can choose an current dashboard template that finest serves your organization’s wants and join your knowledge for cleaner, more practical reporting.

As a creator, you’re supplied with the acquainted Google Workspace consumer interface, permitting you to craft a wide range of dashboards, equivalent to pie charts, column charts, scorecards, treemaps, and extra.

To summarize, if you need a extremely detailed, simply scalable, and visually distinct option to uplevel your analytics dashboards, Looker Studio stands out as one of many main free knowledge visualization platforms within the business.