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[MUSIC PLAYING] Lesson 1 is all about customization. I'm going to show you how to create custom dashboards, set up custom alerts, as well as create custom reporting so that you can measure the metrics that matter most to you. That was a lot of M's, but we're going to get into it right now. The Google Analytics solutions gallery gives you access to unlimited number of dashboards. These are all user-generated by other SELs, marketing professionals, and Google Analytics enthusiasts.
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You can filter on the left-hand side with a variety of different options. And when you find the dashboard that you want, you can go and simply import it into your website. To import a new dashboard to your website, first, you have to select the necessary view, give it a meaningful name, and hit Create.
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Once that loads, you have a beautiful new dashboard to show you at a high level how your website is doing. Whenever importing a new dashboard to your profile, it's always a good practice to double check that all of the widgets are set up the way that you want them to be. Here, we can see that we can diversify our widget based on a variety of criteria from the types of metrics we use, from the visuals that we have, but also how we filter this data.
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In this example, for our social media dashboard, we want to make sure that all of our data is showing from the social channels. This way we're not seeing anything from the paid search or organic search areas. Once you're done, just click Save. Every dashboard allows you up to 12 widgets to explore your data with.
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So if you haven't hit 12 widgets, you can add new ones by clicking the Add Widget button. From there you can choose the type of visuals that you want to have, and it will prompt you with the different criteria you'll have for each widget. So here we want to see the number of users that visit our website for the first time from a social media channel.
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If you're doing customized dashboards like this, make sure that you have the correct filter data in there. So that it matches with the rest of your dashboard. Now, we can see all the new users that have come through social media in which social media channels have been the most effective.
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It's always great to have a few different dashboards on the go so that you can quickly slice and dice your data and get a good sense of how everything is performing on your website. You can also keep them private to yourself or share them with the rest of the people that have access to your Google Analytics. If you're feeling very creative, you can also add them to the solutions gallery so other people can use the same dashboards that you've created.
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When running a business it can be hard to stay on top of every little thing that's going on with our business. And so with Google Analytics, we can set up custom alerts to notify us when any big changes happen in our analytics. Here, I have selected a few of my favorite ones to show you what I'm talking. First, we want to have alerts set up for when our revenue sees big increases or decreases in a weekly period.
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With a revenue decrease alert, I want to be notified on a weekly basis whenever our revenue decreases by 25% than in the previous period. This will send an email directly to me, and I can take action from there. For every website, especially an ecommerce website, having a zero traffic notification or alert is vital to keeping our business running smoothly.
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This alert tells us that any day that we have zero visits to our website triggered through Google Analytics, we'll be notified via email. So if you have any downtime, say, with your server or your website, you'll be notified and able to take action as quickly as possible. The customer reports feature allows you to take your reporting to the next level. Here, we can combine different metrics and dimensions that are not readily available in our traditional reports.
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Things like viewing the success of different days of the week, social media campaigns, paid advertising groups, and so on. Here, we can see that there are countless ways that we can create custom reporting options to better extract information from our analytics. Creating a new custom report is a straightforward but often complex endeavor.
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Here, we want to create a new ecommerce report to get a more in-depth look at the different criteria that's going on with our ecommerce transactions. Here, you can see we're adding a variety of metric groups, such as sessions users, pages per session, as well as transactions and average order value. We then can drill down into filtering by source and media. We can also add other dimensions if we feel it's appropriate part of this report.
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From there, you can also add custom filters to even more customize that view. Select the views that you want to share it with and then hit Save. Now, we can see all of our ecommerce data and metrics in one easy-to-read chart. [MUSIC PLAYING]