Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg,
Search Advocate at Google.
Today, I'll talk about something I'm very passionate about:
data visualization.
I'll go through a Looker Studio report
and talk about best practices
when it comes to monitoring your website Search traffic.
I'll also share a way for you to enrich your Search Console data
inside your Looker Studio dashboards.
♪ [music] ♪
Before we go into charts and graphs,
I would like to discuss data visualizations
on a higher level.
What is the purpose of your dashboard?
I believe most visualizations
can be classified into three use cases.
First, a monitoring dashboard
provides you with a way
to quickly discover a change in the data.
For example, spikes or dips in page clicks
and click-through rates
for important pages of your website.
Second, a data exploration
can help you uncover insights from data.
For example, analyzing Search performance patterns
across different countries,
devices, or website sections.
While you use monitoring dashboards
to find out there is an issue,
you'd use data exploration
to find out why it happened
or how to improve your performance.
Third, data investigation can be used
to uncover trends and patterns
from aggregate Search data.
For example, highlighting to your boss
or even the world
how a specific industry or topic is behaving.
In this video,
I'll discuss a monitoring dashboard,
which should help you find out issues
as they happen.
In the next videos,
I'll also discuss examples of data exploration.
[electronic chirp]
Monitoring dashboards
are part of most people's lives.
For example,
your car has a dashboard
where you monitor the main metrics
you need to drive a car,
or your fitness app
where you monitor your exercises throughout the week.
What these dashboards have in common
is that they use simple visualizations,
such as line or bar charts.
Those are easily understandable.
Their goal is not to dive deep into the numbers.
Monitoring is about looking at the trend
and spotting any changes quickly.
In this video,
I'll go through an example using Looker Studio,
previously known as Data Studio.
The tool lets you create customizable charts
with just a few clicks.
It also allows you to connect data from multiple sources
and has a simple way to share dashboards with your team.
Go to the URL below
to find the monitoring dashboard template
and link it to your own Search Console data source.
If you don't know how to create a data source,
check the links in the description.
[electronic chirp]
There are three main sections in this dashboard.
First, the filters,
which allow you to control the data shown
and the dates.
Second, the line charts,
to help you monitor clicks and CTR over time.
And last, the table,
showing a drilldown into specific pages.
In the
you can change between different Search Console properties
you have access to.
Choose a date range you would like to see in the report
or select one of the following:
Page.
Use this to include or exclude
one or more pages from your website.
You can use regular expressions
similar to the way you use them in Search Console.
Type.
Use this to choose among the different data types,
including Discover and Google News.
You can only choose one at a time.
Country.
Use this to include or exclude
one or more countries.
Device.
Use this to choose one or more device categories.
After you filter your data,
the line charts will show you
how your metrics change over time.
In this case,
we chose to look at clicks
and click-through rate, or CTR.
As you can see,
weekends and weekdays have very different patterns.
It's a good practice
to always use a multiple of seven days
in your line charts.
Keep your eyes on days
that break that pattern.
When you analyze trends,
charts will be more helpful to you.
But if you want to go deeper,
it's more effective to analyze particular pages
or groups of them using a table.
For example, use the page filter
to include only specific sections of your website.
Use the country filter
to check how different pages perform
in countries you care about.
Use the type filter
to analyze page-level performance
for each of the data types.
[electronic chirp]
In the previous episode,
I discussed ways to join performance data
exported via Google Sheets
to other sources of data,
like website sections,
country/regions, and budget.
This is also possible inside Looker Studio,
using the data blending functionality,
which allows you to create charts,
tables, and controls
based on multiple sources of data.
Check the links in the description to learn more about data blending.
It's not always straightforward,
but since this is a video,
you can pause
or watch it in... [deeper voice] slow motion.
[electronic chirp]
Let's use a similar example from the last episode
where you have a spreadsheet that maps all your pages
to different websites sections,
such as the one shown here.
Create a data source
for this spreadsheet on Looker Studio,
then navigate to your Search traffic monitoring dashboard
and select the table.
In the setup menu,
you'll find an option to blend data.
When you click it,
you'll find an interface
where you can join a table
to the existing data source.
Click to join a table
and choose the data source you just created,
then click to configure the join.
You'll see several join operator options.
You can learn more about them
in the links in the description.
For now,
I'll choose the
which returns matching rows from the right table
plus nonmatching rows from the left table.
Choose the page fields from both tables
and hit
Then pull the section dimension
into the Dimension box
and hit
Now, you'll see the dimension section
also available in the table setup,
so you can use it
to monitor your main metrics by section
on an ongoing basis.
You can do the same for multiple tables
to enrich your monitoring dashboards
with information that is not available through Search Console.
In addition to page groups,
you could also blend queue clusters,
country/regions, and others.
Your imagination is the limit.
Hopefully, the tips in this video
will help you build dashboards that are insightful
and easy to understand.
You can use the template provided here
as a starting point
or build something from scratch.
But remember,
for monitoring dashboards,
always use easy-to-understand visualizations,
such as line and bar charts,
and, eventually, tables.
In the next video,
I'll show some examples of data exploration,
also using Search Console data.
Stay tuned.
♪ [music] ♪
Are you kidding me?