The Dashboards feature in Google-Analytics is a great way to arrange a set of related custom widgets into a report you look at frequently (for example, see dashboards for a variety of use cases in our Solutions Gallery). Today we’re expanding dashboards’ functionality with four new real-time widgets that you can and plug into any dashboard (new or existing) of your choosing!
1) Setting up a real-time widget
If you have set up a dashboard widget before, then this will be very familiar to you. Create a new dashboard or click on the +Add Widget menu option of an existing dashboard.
Pick any of the four widgets available in the Real-time: section and customize the widget. Below I have created a widget that shows me active visitors from Canada but split up by Traffic-Type:
Here is how I set up this widget:
I chose the ‘Counter’ real-time widget and gave it a custom name (“Canada Active Visitors”), then set up a ‘Group by’ on ‘Traffic type’. This is how I see the split between referral and organic in the widget. Finally, I set up a filter to only show visitors from Canada.
2. Combining with other dashboard widgets
By creating and combining widgets, you can perform many types of analysis at a glance.
Using filters you can compare different segments of your real-time traffic. For example you can create two separate widgets that have different filters for the Country dimension (say Country==USA for one and Country==Canada for another) and you can compare real-time USA traffic versus India traffic, side by side.
You can go further and set up real-time and non real-time widgets on the same dashboard.
Here is how one of my dashboards looks like (I use it to monitor and understand how traffic from Canada behaves after a blog post):
I have 5 widgets and widget #4 is a non real-time widget that gives me context on where I get visits from across the globe over the last month.
We hope you will enjoy creating new dashboards with these widgets and sparkling some real-time magic on existing dashboards!
