Do you know what is Google data studio and what is it used for?
If however, you already know the tool, and you would like to know how to use Google Data Studio to monitor your categories, sub-categories and landing pages your website like a pro: today you are lucky because we are going to teach you the first steps to carry out, to get more familiar with it and understand how to use Google data studio as a true professional.
Well, surely many times you've raised the amount of hours that you lose doing reports, or integrating information from different platforms to perform a quick analysis of data to make decisions... Today we'll talk about one of the best tools to increase our productivity and efficiency to multiple reports to clients: Google Data Studio.
What is Google Data Studio?
It is a free tool from Google, you allows you to collect and manipulate data from different sites (Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Search Console, etc), that are important for your management of day-to-day in Digital Marketing, automatically and dynamically, create graphs that allow you to display the information more easily. In addition, you can share your reports with your team and customers immediately.
It is an ideal solution, whether you assemble a dashboard or report does not carry any time, but saves you hours of work, which you can use to analyze the data instead of copying and pasting charts for hours.
How to use Google Data Studio?
1.Sources of data
Before you begin to create our report, you must connect to the data source with the platform.
The data sources can be:
- Google Analytics
- Google Ads
- Google sheets
- BigQuery
- Measurement tools of third parties connected through the APIs
- Etc....
*The data from these sources will be updated automatically.
Once we have chosen our source of data (we will use as an example Google Analytics), it will display the list of metrics and dimensions that Analytics has created.
It is important to mention that for use Google Data Studio to efficiently, we must know that we can use more than one source of data in our reports.
2. A new report
Once we have created our source of data, we can move on to create a template already made by Data Studio, or to start the report from scratch with a “blank report”.
If we chose to do our report with a “blank report”, we will find our blank canvas, and we have to choose the right pane as our source of data.
From here, in the pane on the right side you can choose the theme and design of our canvas, as:
- Visibility of the header
- The size and orientation of the canvas
- Palette of colors of graphics
- Etc....
While at the top we will be able to:
- To add a new page or duplicate a page
- Add graphics
- To manage our data sources
- Add images and text
- Etc....
3. Graphics and resources
Once we are clear on the properties of our canvas, we can move on to insert charts and tables that will help us to easily visualize the information of our data sources.
We can use from the tables, charts and bars to maps and pivot tables.
In this post we will be talking only of the most simple:
- Cards results
- Graphs of time series
- Bar graphs
- Pie charts
- Selection period
Which are selected from the top of our canvas.
It is important to mention that each graph is composed of the logic of metric/dimension, being the metric to the data which you want to calculate or show in the chart, as can be sessions, users, page views, etc.; while the dimension is the value by which to break down the data, which can be temporary, URL's, channels of traffic, etc
In our example template we have selected the following graphs with the following metrics and dimensions:
3.1 Graph of time series
With this graph, we can analyze the evolution of a metric over time. By default only allows us to use as dimension “date”, either by day, week, month, or year.
It also allows us to make a comparison with a custom period of time. In our example, we are measuring the number of sessions a month, compared with the same period before.
And at the same time, you can filter by segments default Google Analytics, such as organic traffic, paid traffic, direct traffic, etc
It is also important to mention that you can use more than one metric graph, and in the style section, you can modify the colors, lines, and properties of the axes.
3.2 bar Chart
With this graph, we can visualize a particular metric as a function of different dimensions.
In our example, we analyze the sessions (metric) depending on the channel from (dimension).
3.3 circular Chart
In this graph only allows you to configure a dimension and a metric, and use it to also display the number of sessions (metric), about the device used (dimension).
3.4 Card results
This graph only allows for use as a dimension the period of time, as this is a chart very simple which shows a specific metric in a given time; and also allows you to do a comparison with another period of time custom.
3.4 Selection of period
Finally we have the selection period which allows the selection of a particular period of time, and in this way update automatically the temporal dimension of the graphics at the level of the page each time that this dimension is changed, without the need to do so by graphic chart.
As we can see so far, Google Data Studio is a very powerful tool providing that we know how to use it, because it will help us in the analysis of our accounts with a basic report, with the possibility of adapting to our need for information, and thus optimize the process of report creation within our company.
