Note: Data Studio can do most of the same things that GA dashboards can do. Data Studio gives more control over the presentation of the data, so might therefore be a better choice for both tracking data and presenting it to others, than using the traditional dashboard. It also allows data to be brought in from other sources (through Google Sheets) and combined with GA data.  Also, there are only a limited number of dashboards that can be set up for accounts, but an unlimited number of reports can be created with Data Studio.  

Dashboards are a way of collecting the information you want to pull from analytics into one screen so that you can see everything at a glance.

Much of the information within Google Analytics is spread out among the various report tabs – audience, acquisition, behavior, etc.  Dashboards allow you to create a single page containing widgets that show information from within those reports in one place.  They are generally used to give an at-a-glance picture of your web traffic, as an alternative to browsing through many separate reports to get all the information you are looking for.

Dashboards can be shared.  When you create a new dashboard you have the option of importing from Google’s public gallery, which has hundreds of dashboards that other people have created.  This means you can pull in useful dashboards developed by the experts rather than spending a lot of time thinking about what you want to include.

Dashboards are also a standard way of reporting analytics information to others in your organization.  You can export the information to a PDF to be printed, or share access to someone else having a Google account, or email to another person.  The email can be set up as one-off or sent on a regularly repeating schedule.  

There are a few limitations with dashboards: each GA view can contain up to 20 private Dashboards per user, each account can contain up to 50 shared dashboards per view, each dashboard can show up to 12 widgets and the data must come from within GA.  

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