Google announced the launch of Shortcuts in Google Analytics. These, as Google explains, are designed to get your the exact view you want of your data in “record time.”
Google is all about speeding things up, and this should help out in the GA department.
“Rather than having to go through the ‘find report, add segment, change, sort’ process daily, with Shortcuts you can do it once, save it, and come back to it in a single click,” says Andrew Seguin from Google’s Analytics team.
The shortcuts will save standard or custom reports for context, the currently viewed tab on the report, sort order, advanced segments and graphed metric. They will not, however, save date ranges or sample sizes. Google says this is because they’re dependent on the data you’re looking at. If you need to save something to the shortcut, just make sure you click save from the utility bar.
To set up a shortcut, click the “Shortcut” button, which appears on standard or custom report pages, in the utility bar. Name the shortcut, and it will take you to a new “Shortcuts” section in the “Home” tab. You can visit this section anytime from Google Analytics to quickly get to the reports you want to look at, with minimal hassle.
Well done, Google. Although personally, I’d like to see the option from the realtime overview page.
It’s worth noting that shortcuts can be emailed and exported, just like any other standard report. Shortcuts apply at the profile level.