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How to Create a Tracking Dashboard in Google Analytics

Cody Schneider•

A good tracking dashboard gives you a single, clear view of your website's performance without forcing you to click through a dozen different reports. This article will show you exactly how to build a custom dashboard right inside Google Analytics, step-by-step. You'll learn how to organize your key metrics in one place so you can get the answers you need in seconds, not minutes.

Why Bother with a Custom Dashboard in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 comes with standard reports that are useful, but they often show you a little bit of everything. The real power comes from creating a dashboard that's tailored specifically to your business goals. Think of it as your personal mission control for your website.

A custom dashboard lets you:

  • Stop the Tab-Hopping: Instead of opening the Traffic Acquisition, Engagement, and Monetization reports separately, you can pull the most important widget from each one onto a single screen.

  • Focus on What Matters: An e-commerce site needs to see revenue and add-to-carts, while a lead generation site wants to track form submissions. A custom dashboard cuts out the noise and highlights the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you actually care about.

  • See the Full Picture at a Glance: Get a bird's-eye view of your traffic, user behavior, and conversion performance all in one place. This makes daily check-ins and weekly reporting much faster and more efficient.

The standard GA4 reports are built for everyone. Your custom dashboard is built just for you.

Getting Started: Navigating the GA4 Library

In the old Google Analytics (Universal Analytics), dashboards were a main feature. In GA4, they are called "Overview Reports" and live inside the "Library." The Library is where you can create, modify, and organize all of the reports that appear in your left-hand navigation. You have to go inside the Library to start building.

Finding the Library

To get started, log into your Google Analytics 4 property and follow these steps:

  1. In the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports.

  2. At the very bottom of the menu that appears, you’ll see an option for Library. Click it.

Inside the Library, you’ll see two main components: "Collections" and "Reports."

  • Collections are the groups of reports you see in your main sidebar, like "Life cycle" and "User."

  • Reports are the individual reports dashboards that make up those collections.

Today, we'll be starting in the "Reports" section to build our dashboard, and then we'll add it to a Collection to make it visible.

Step-by-Step: Creating Your Custom GA4 Dashboard

Let's build a simple marketing dashboard that shows top-level traffic numbers, where that traffic is coming from, and how many conversions we're getting. This is a common starting point for most businesses.

Step 1: Start with a Fresh Canvas

First, we need to create a new, empty report which will become our dashboard.

Inside the Library, click the blue + Create new report button, and from the dropdown menu, select Create overview report. An "overview report" is what GA4 calls a dashboard.

You'll be presented with a blank canvas, ready for you to add your data "cards."

Step 2: Add Your First Metrics Cards

Cards are the widgets that display your data. You can choose from a library of pre-built cards or create your own from more detailed reports. Let's start with some of the basics.

  1. Click the + Add cards button on your empty dashboard canvas.

  2. A sidebar will slide out on the right, showing all the available "Summary Cards."

  3. Let's add a few essential top-line metrics. Scroll through the list or use the search bar to find and check the boxes for:

    • Users and new users (from the Users card)

    • Sessions (from the Traffic acquisition card)

    • Conversions (a simple count of your key events)

  4. Click the blue Add cards button in the top right.

You'll now see these three cards appear on your dashboard. You can rearrange them by simply clicking and dragging them into the order you prefer. Most people put their primary metrics, like users or revenue, top-left.

Step 3: Add Visualizations and Tables

Scorecards are great, but charts and tables give you more context. Now, let’s add cards that visualize our data. For example, let's add a line chart of traffic over time and a table showing which channels are driving that traffic.

  1. Again, click + Add cards.

  2. This time, find and select a more visual card like Users by Session default channel group. This card will show you a bar chart of traffic by channel and a small table with the details.

  3. You can also add a line chart like Users in the last 30 minutes to track real-time activity, which can be useful for seeing immediate traffic spikes after sending an email or launching a campaign.

  4. Once you've selected your cards, click Add cards to place them on your dashboard.

You can drag these new visual cards to organize your dashboard. A common layout is to have scorecards at the top for a quick summary, followed by line charts for trends, and tables at the bottom for more detailed breakdowns.

Step 4: Linking to Deeper Reports

Each card on your dashboard is also a shortcut. If you want to investigate a number further, you don't have to go find the corresponding report manually. Simply click the link title at the bottom of any card (e.g., "View traffic acquisition") and GA4 will take you straight to the full, detailed report for more context.

This is where the power of overview reports really shines. You get the high-level summary on the dashboard and have a one-click gateway to the underlying details when you need to dig deeper.

Step 5: Save and Publish Your New Dashboard

Once you’re happy with the layout of your new dashboard, it's time to save it and make it accessible from your main navigation.

  1. In the top right corner, click the blue Save button.

  2. A popup will ask you to name your report. Give it a clear name like "Marketing KPI Dashboard" or "E-commerce Performance Overview." Avoid generic names so you can find it later. Click Save.

  3. Now your report is saved, but it's not yet visible in the main "Reports" menu. You'll be taken back to the Library.

  4. Under "Collections," find the collection where you'd like your dashboard to appear. For a marketing dashboard, the "Life cycle" collection is a good fit. Click the three dots on the "Life cycle" collection card and select Edit.

  5. On the left side of the screen, find your newly created dashboard ("Marketing KPI Dashboard") in the list of available reports. Drag it over to the collection structure on the right. You can place it wherever you like in the list, adding it to the top is often the most convenient.

  6. Click Save, then Save changes to current collection.

That’s it! If you now go to your main "Reports" navigation on the left, you’ll see "Marketing KPI Dashboard" as the first thing in the "Life cycle" section. You've officially built and published your first custom GA4 dashboard.

Tips for a Dashboard That Actually Gets Used

Just building a dashboard isn't enough. It needs to be useful. Here are a few tips to make sure your dashboard provides real value and doesn't just sit there.

  • Know Your Audience: Are you building this for yourself, your marketing team, or your CEO? Your CEO might want to see high-level revenue and growth numbers, while your marketing manager needs to see campaign-level conversion rates and ROAS. Tailor the dashboard to its audience.

  • Focus on Outcomes, Not a Flood of Data: Don't just show 'Users' for the sake of it. Show what those users are doing. Add cards for 'Conversions,' 'Total revenue,' or 'Event count' for key interactions like newsletter signups. Metrics without context are just numbers.

  • Keep It Simple: It’s tempting to add 20 different cards. Resist the urge. A cluttered dashboard is an ignored dashboard. Focus on 5 to 8 of the most critical metrics that tell you if you're winning or losing. If you need more, consider creating a second, more specific dashboard (e.g., one for paid ads, one for content performance).

  • Use Comparisons to Add Context: When building more advanced reports to link to your dashboard, always enable the comparison feature (e.g., compare to the previous period). A 10% conversion rate is nice, but knowing it was 8% last month is much more powerful.

  • Name Everything Clearly: "My Dashboard" isn't helpful. "Monthly E-commerce Financials" is. Give all your custom reports and dashboards descriptive, human-readable names so everyone on your team knows exactly what they’re looking at.

Final Thoughts

Building a custom dashboard in Google Analytics is one of the best ways to transform your raw website data into quick, actionable insights. By focusing on your most important KPIs in a single view, you spend less time digging through reports and more time making smart decisions based on what the data is telling you.

While GA4 is great for website analysis, we know that your most important data is often scattered across different tools - your ads platform, your sales CRM, and your e-commerce backend. Instead of building siloed reports, we created Graphed to connect all your data sources automatically. You can just ask questions in plain English like, "create a dashboard showing Facebook Ads spend, GA traffic, and resulting Shopify sales for our summer campaign." Our AI data analyst builds the dashboard for you in seconds, saving you from the manual work of connecting the dots yourself.