How to create a custom report in Google Analytics

How to create custom reports in Google Analytics to get better and refined segmentation on your website traffic data.

Custom reports are a method to better shape and filter traffic to gain a more detailed analysis.

For this blog post, I am going to create a report to view the average pages per session for the landing page.

This metric is one way to see what pages are making viewers click through to more and other pages.

Navigating to custom reports

In your Analytics dashboard click custom reports under the customization tab on the left menu.

On the custom reports page, it will list any created reports. Click New custom report to begin creating a report.

Set the title for your report and then in the Report content section click add metric

A drop down will appear with dimensions that can be expanded or you can search for dimensions at the top of this dropdown.

Pages/session are in the commonly used dimension category. Name this metric “pages/session”.

Filters

Filters give you the ability to include or exclude data for certain parameters.

An example of this being you want to exclude in the report landing page URL’s that have ?page= in them.

This filter would be exclude landing page with regex (?page=).

() matches everything enclosed in exact order anywhere in the string.

Therefore any landing page with ?page= will not be included in the report.

The regex documentation is can be found here.

Views

The last part of creating the report is what view/s to use. A view in Google Analytics is a filtered data set. An example might be a view where the traffic from a network is not included.

For this example, I am using the All website data view. Once you click the save button the report page will load up with a configurable line chart and table showing the average pages viewed per session for landing pages.