Google Data Studio - Build Stories, Not Dashboards

“There is a magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation — the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.” - Henry D. Hubbard

In this article we will dive into how Google Data Studio (GDS) can aid companies strengthen their commitment to identify and share insights from their data to paint a more complete picture which can lead them to take the leap from data visualization to data-driven decision making in order to improve business outcomes. We will also send a probe into the different visualizations (read capabilities) available in GDS that can be leveraged to express effective story-telling. 

What we will look at

- What Is It

- The Need

- Before Getting Started

- Where To Start

- Blend In - Literally!

- Keep Calm and Collaborate

- Next Up

What Is It

GDS is basically Google’s free data visualization and reporting product which is a part of Google Marketing Platform and can be natively integrated with Google Cloud. GDS allows easy access to data from Google Analytics, Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, YouTube Analytics, Google Sheets, Google BigQuery and over 500 more data sources, both Google and non-Google, to visualize and interactively explore data.

Why

GDS, in its simplest form is a tool, a mere instrument to tell a cohesive story.The eruption of multiple marketing channels have added enormous layers of complexity to the consumer funnel and have increased the influx of data by soaring amounts. Hence it is very easy to get distracted and end up not being able to put a finger on clear actionable insights therefore companies take upon themselves a responsibility on behalf of their clients and BI teams on behalf of their heads to accurately decipher the metrics and patterns and use them to present a useful narrative.

Getting from dumping data to devising concise insights is a process and like any process it needs an important ingredient that is team input. GDS aids that by offering seamless real-time collaboration during creation of dashboards that will tell the story.

Before You Push The Pedal

Before executing any kind of analytics reporting and getting started with GDS, be mindful of the following key things; Firstly, structure the reports according to your audience, which really means who do you intend to share the report with? Who will use the report and for what? Because a report that is supposed to be used internally by marketing teams needs to be organized in a different way than a report that is to be used by company executives to track monthly or quarterly KPIs. The most significant difference between the two reports should be the level of detail and the drill down capabilities.

Secondly, know what goals you should be tracking and not broadly but concisely. Goal tracking is the direct result of your marketing initiatives,If you are investing in features/strategies which balloon up the user engagement, you may primarily track metrics that directly tie that goal like stickiness(DAU/MAU), session quality, page depth etc.

Moreover, decide what visualization you should use to tell the story you intend to. Because many a times you may find yourself in a situation where you will find multiple ways to convey a simple statement but one of the visualizations will stand out in terms of it having a perfect balance of being visually intriguing, user friendly, and intelligible.The course instructor, Michele Kiss suggested a good starting point for reference in this regard by sharing the following template of ‘which chart should I be using?’ aspect.

Where To Start

A real pain point of creating attention grabbing and tolerable dashboards is creating the design, many marketers may not be good at design with regards to the dashboards looking professional as well as thoughtful, so a reference is almost integral to have. Fortunately, with every great (read free and accessible) tool comes a great community. A lot of community visualizations have been shared by marketing professionals and even experts ready to be used for inspiration.

• Google Data Studio gallery - A few marketing templates are in the Data Studio reporting section.
• Data Studio Report Gallery - Includes all the previous templates and also reports built by the community, similar to the Google Analytics Gallery.
• Jeff Sauer - Report templates.
• Supermetrics - SEM templates.
• Sheets for Marketers

Blend In - Literally

One of the major highlights with regards to the capabilities of GDS is the fact that it seamlessly allows blending of different data sources within a report or even a table. This serves our initial purpose, to tell the complete story. You can blend not only data from Google Analytics but also Google Search Console, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Ads, Google Sheets, and CRM or ecommerce platform data. This has a major impact in creating useful reports. It helps add context, this can help corroborate GA data, reveal seasonal trends and can help identify discrepancies due to different attribution models of different sources. These integrations are more commonly known as GDS connectors and apart from native integrations, If you also need to pull data from your social acquisition channels, or other less known 3rd party services? you will probably be able to find a paid connector and provide reporting for all channels in one place.

Keep Calm and Collaborate

As marketing has increasingly started to hinge on quality of collaboration between different silos of PPC, SEO, CRM and Content GDS allows each team to have read and/or edit capabilities within reports. Each team member can work on their part of the report or review in real-time. The ability to keep your team on the same page along with increasing transparency between clients is embedded by design in GDS so that no extra resources are needed for smooth coordination between teams.

Next Up

I plan to deep dive into the advanced capabilities of GDS such as Calculated Metrics, Data Blending, CASE Formulas and other cool uses in another article so stay tuned for more and follow me on LinkedIn. A thanks to CXL and Michele Kiss for delivering a comprehensive course for Google Data Studio to walk me through the ins and outs of the tool which helped me learn the nuances of GDS which I can leverage to my advantage.