Visualize your data with Google Data Studio

What is Google Data Studio?

Launched in 2016, Google Data Studio is a free tool that allows you to visualize data in customized and automated reports to clearly present digital performance and make it easier to analyze and understand.

This eliminates the need to navigate from one platform to another to analyze and compare your performance. Data Studio allows you to compile all your data in one place.

What are the benefits of Data Studio?

Integrate data from multiple sources

The primary benefit of Data Studio is its easy and free integration with the entire Google ecosystem. You can connect to your report sources from :

• Google Analytics to measure your web performance,
• Google Ads to track your search, video, youtube and shopping campaigns
• Google Search Console to analyze the health of your site and your organic performance
• Or Campaign manager 360 and Display & Video 360

It is also possible to feed a Data Studio report with data from platforms external to Google to track email campaigns or social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok. While connectors to these third-party sources are usually paid for, it is possible to manually extract data from these platforms and save it in a Google Sheet spreadsheet that you can then connect to your report. If this option requires more manipulations in order to perform exports at a regular frequency, it has the merit of being free.

A collaborative, interactive and real-time tool

These 3 notions, at the heart of the solution proposed by Google, make it an excellent reporting tool.

The data is refreshed automatically. This means less time spent on updating data and more time spent on analyzing it to make business decisions. It is also possible to dynamically update the date ranges. So you can decide to display the data of the past week or month.

Data Studio also offers some interactivity in the reports. You can use multiple dynamic filtering systems via a drop-down menu to quickly compare performance according to different criteria (traffic source, age or location of Internet users, time slots, etc.).

The solution also allows you to share the report by defining accesses. It is therefore possible to add collaborators who will be able to edit the report or to give only "read-only" access for users who only need to consult it.

It is also possible to send the report by email, in pdf format, to a distribution list and at a predefined frequency or to integrate it into a web page.

Let your creativity speak for itself

If Google Data Studio offers basic templates according to your objectives to help you create your report, it is possible to start from a blank sheet of paper and create a custom report to meet your company's needs.

Complete graphic customization

The entire report is customizable and the presentation options are almost infinite.

In addition to the possibility to customize the report with your company colors (by inserting your logo or by modifying the colors and the typography), all the elements such as tables, graphs or maps, can be positioned in the desired way.

As in Excel or Google Sheet, it is also possible to use conditional formatting in tables to highlight results.

In addition, Data Studio offers a wide selection of charts that you will need to explore to determine the best presentation option to meet your needs.

Complete customization of the data

As for the graphical component, the data customization possibilities allow to better highlight them and to facilitate their reading.

It is thus possible to rename dimensions and metrics or to group data by categories. It is also easy to compare the data to the previous period.

It is also possible to create dynamic elements of several levels of depth. For example, it is possible to represent the distribution of sales by product category in the form of a pie chart. By clicking on one of the categories, the pie chart will show the distribution at the level of the sub-categories.

Finally, Data Studio offers the possibility to create your own metrics, which can be very useful when a dimension is not available. This is the case, for example, for the cost per completed view, which is not available for Facebook videos. In Data Studio it is possible to recover this value by creating a new dimension equal to the advertising cost divided by the number of completed views.

Google Data Studio has become a must-have tool as it is so complete and flexible. Whether you are a marketer, a data enthusiast or simply curious to better understand and analyze your web performance, Data Studio will make your job easier and save you precious time.

Register now for our next training session on the subject: