How to Create a Customer Experience Dashboard in Google Analytics

Tracking website traffic is just the first step, understanding the experience your visitors have is what truly drives growth. With a well-built dashboard, you can stop guessing and start seeing exactly where your user experience shines and where it causes friction. This article will guide you step-by-step on how to create a powerful customer experience dashboard using the tools already inside Google Analytics 4.

What is a Customer Experience Dashboard (and Why Do You Need One)?

A Customer Experience (CX) dashboard goes beyond simple metrics like pageviews and sessions. It's a curated collection of data visualizations focused on user behavior, engagement, and satisfaction. Think of it as your website's health report from your customer's perspective. Instead of just seeing how many people visited, you start to understand who they are, how they interacted with your site, and whether they found the experience valuable.

Building one directly in Google Analytics helps you answer critical business questions like:

Where are users getting stuck or dropping off?
Which marketing channels bring in the most engaged visitors (not just the most traffic)?
Is the mobile experience as good as the desktop experience?
What content actually resonates with visitors and encourages them to take action?

By monitoring these insights, you can move from reactive problem-solving to proactively improving your website, creating smoother journeys that boost conversions and build loyalty.

Key Metrics for Your CX Dashboard in GA4

Before you start building, it’s important to understand the building blocks. Google Analytics 4 introduced several new "engagement" focused metrics that are perfect for measuring customer experience. Here are the most important ones to include in your dashboard.

1. Engagement Metrics

These metrics moved beyond the old, often misleading "Bounce Rate" to give you a truer sense of user interaction.

Engaged sessions: This is the backbone of GA4’s engagement reporting. A session is counted as "engaged" if the visitor stays on your site for more than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or views at least two pages. It’s a simple yes/no flag for whether a user showed any meaningful sign of interest.
Engagement rate: Simply the percentage of total sessions that were engaged sessions. A low engagement rate is a clear signal that visitors aren't finding what they expect, whether it’s due to poor targeting, slow page load times, or confusing navigation.
Average engagement time: This metric measures the average length of time your site was the main focus in a user's browser. It's a far more accurate way to measure attention than the old "Average Session Duration," as it only counts time when the tab is active. Low engagement time on key pages can indicate that your content isn't compelling enough to hold a user's attention.

2. Acquisition & Behavioral Metrics

These metrics help connect the user experience back to your acquisition strategy and on-site behavior.

First User vs. Session Default Channel Group: It's important to differentiate these. First User shows you which channel originally brought a visitor to your site, while Session shows how they arrived for a particular visit. Comparing these can reveal, for example, that you acquire users through paid social but they return directly to convert later. This helps you understand the full customer journey.
Views by Page title: Knowing which pages get the most views is a starting point. Your CX dashboard should pair this metric with engagement time and conversions per page to see which content is not just popular, but also effective. A page with high views but very low engagement time could have a misleading title or be underperforming.
Conversions: A conversion is any meaningful action you want a user to take (e.g., generate_lead, purchase, sign_up). This is the ultimate proof of a positive customer experience. Tracking conversions by channel, landing page, and device type instantly shows where your experience is successfully guiding users toward your goals.

3. User & Tech Metrics

Understanding who your users are and how they access your site is vital for tailoring the experience.

Users by Device category: Breaking down all your key CX metrics (engagement, conversions, etc.) by Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet is non-negotiable. It’s incredibly common to discover that your mobile conversion rate is a fraction of your desktop rate, pointing to clear friction in the mobile experience that needs to be fixed.
Users by Country: If you serve an international audience, you may find that engagement rates differ significantly by region. This could be due to language barriers, cultural preferences in design, or page speed issues in specific countries.

Step-by-Step: How to Build Your CX Dashboard in GA4

While GA4 doesn't have a classic "dashboard" builder like Looker Studio or Tableau, it allows you to create and save custom reports that function as a shareable, persistent dashboard for your team. Here's how to build one piece by piece.

Step 1: Navigate to the Reports Library

In the left-hand navigation of your GA4 property, click on Reports. At the very bottom of the reporting navigation menu that appears, you’ll see a folder icon labeled Library. This is where all report customization happens. Click on it.

Your goal here is to create a new "Detail Report" that focuses specifically on customer experience metrics, then add it to your main navigation for easy access.

Step 2: Create a New Detail Report

Inside the Library, click the blue + Create new report button and select Create detail report from the dropdown. This is a customizable report table that we'll build out to act as our CX dashboard view.

Step 3: Choose a Template and Add Your Visualizations

You can start from scratch, but it's often easier to build from a template. The Pages and screens template is an excellent starting point.

Your screen will now be split into two main sections: your report canvas on the left, and the customization panel on the right. In the right-hand panel under "CARDS," you can add, remove, and edit the data charts that make up your report.

Let's build a few essential "cards" for our dashboard:

Card 1: Content Experience & Engagement

This card will show you which pages are performing best at holding user attention.

In the "Customize report" panel on the right, under Dimensions, click "Add dimension" and select Page title and screen name. This is typically more readable than page URLs. Set it as the default.
Under Metrics, ensure you have the following selected: Views, Active users, Engaged sessions, Average engagement time, and Conversions. Click "Apply".

You now have a table that shows your top content and, more importantly, how users are actually engaging with it. You can quickly sort by Average engagement time to find pages that punch above their weight.

Card 2: Channel Performance Overview

This card helps you see which marketing channels are delivering valuable, engaged users.

First, save the changes to your report by clicking the blue "Save" button in the top right. Give it a name like "CX Performance Dashboard."
Now, let's customize our dimensions. On the right panel, under Dimensions, click on the current dimension (e.g., 'Page title'). Click "Remove," then "Add dimension." Search for and select Session default channel group.
For Metrics, keep Engaged sessions and Conversions, but add in Engagement rate for at-a-glance comparison. Click "Apply".

This view immediately shows if, for example, your "Organic Search" traffic has a 70% engagement rate while your "Paid Social" traffic is only at 30%, indicating a potential mismatch between your ad creative and your landing page experience.

Card 3: Device Experience Comparison

Most sites have different performance on mobile vs. desktop. This card makes that visible.

Again, edit your report cards. This time, set your Primary Dimension to Device category.
For Metrics, choose Total users, Engagement rate, Conversions, and if relevant for you, a revenue metric like Total revenue.

This simple table will quickly show you if you have a "mobile problem." A significantly lower engagement or conversion rate on mobile is a major red flag that your mobile design or performance is creating friction for more than half your audience.

Step 4: Save & Add Your New Dashboard to the Navigation

Once you’ve configured your report with the cards and metrics you want, click "Save" again.

Now, go back one step to the main Library view. You will see your new report under the "Reports" section.

Find the "Life Cycle" collection (or another relevant collection) and click "Edit collection." On the left, find your saved "CX Performance Dashboard" and drag it over to the menu structure on the right. You can place it under "Engagement."

Click "Save," and you will now see your custom CX dashboard appear directly in your main reporting navigation! It's now a permanent, one-click part of your GA4 interface.

How to Squeeze More Insight From Your Dashboard

Building the dashboard is just half the battle. The real value comes from how you analyze it.

Look for Relationships: Don’t just look at one metric. A page might have low engagement time but be the final step before a conversion, which means it’s working perfectly! Always look at metrics in context with each other to understand the broader story.
Use Comparisons: The real insights come alive when you use GA4's "Add comparison" feature at the top of your report. Compare Mobile vs. Desktop users, or traffic from Google vs. Facebook. This is the fastest way to spot inequalities in the customer experience across different cohorts.
Think in Trends: Change your date range to longer periods like "Last 90 days" and look at the line charts. Did your engagement rate suddenly drop after you launched a new feature? Did average engagement time start climbing after you began publishing a new type of content? These trends are often more meaningful than daily numbers.
Ask "Why?": Google Analytics tells you what is happening, but it can't tell you why. If you see mobile users are dropping off on a specific page, pair that data with tools like heatmaps or polls to understand the qualitative reasons behind the numbers.

Final Thoughts

Creating a customer experience dashboard in Google Analytics centralizes the metrics that matter for understanding user behavior. By focusing on engagement rate, average engagement time, and conversions by different segments like channel and device, you can turn raw traffic data into actionable insights for continuous improvement.

When you need to bring in data from outside of Google Analytics - like ad spend from Facebook, revenue from Shopify, or lead status from Salesforce - building a complete picture can still become a manual exercise. We built Graphed to solve this by letting you connect all your data sources and create real-time, cross-platform dashboards using simple natural language. Instead of configuring reports, you can just ask, "Show me a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs GA4 conversions for the last month," and get an instant answer, letting you focus on insight, not setup.