Create Shortcuts to Customized Google Analytics Reports

Google Analytics is a great free tool from Google that millions of small and large websites use to keep track of their website visitors. The Google Analytics team has released a new feature that makes viewing customized reports a lot easier. The feature is called Shortcuts and it basically lets you view a report with any customizations including advanced segments, secondary dimensions, sorting, graph views, etc.
Any Custom or Standard report can be added to shortcuts. However, any Real-Time on Intelligence Events reports cannot be added to shortcuts at this time. Also, Goals reports cannot be added either. Other than that, though, you can start saving your customized reports to shortcuts. Here’s how.
First, go to a report and then customize it however you like. For example, I went to Traffic Sources – All Traffic report and then chose Search Traffic under Advanced Segments. Then I chose Country under Secondary Dimension and lastly I sorted the whole thing by Avg. Visit Duration. Now in order to save this report with these settings, click on the Shortcut link at the top navigation bar.

Go ahead and give your new Shortcut a name. You can type in a fairly long name so make sure to include any relevant details. I named mine Search Traffic by Country Sorted by Duration.

Now you’ll see the header for the report change to the name you just gave it.

Pretty sweet! Now I can access this customized report anytime by clicking on Home and then clicking on Shortcuts in the left-hand pane:

So that’s one really useful new feature of Google Analytics that will make it a lot easier for webmasters to view reports with customized settings quickly