- Welcome to The Journey.
Today we're going to talk about how to get started
with Google Data Studio for your business.
So technology it's moving too fast,
even for us millennials, but also for your business.
There's too much data.
And when there's too much data,
what happens?
- I don't know what happens.
- Analysis paralysis.
Same thing happens when I go out to eat to a restaurant,
that's actually a vegan restaurant.
Cause you know how it is,
especially for you vegans vegetarians,
you go to a restaurant and you're just ordering off
that side menu because there's not many options.
Then you go to a vegan restaurant.
Oh my gosh, you can order from the whole menu.
And I just sit there
and the waiter comes back like five times
the point of this story, analysis paralysis.
- So all of this analysis paralysis and all of this data
and all this information overload,
can get overwhelming, right?
So Google Data Studio is what we're going
to be talking about and I'm going
to be showing you doing a live little demo here
and how to really kind of disseminate some
of that information into a nice and easy to use dashboard.
And the cool thing is it's customizable.
It is a lot to take
in so if you're not like super data-driven,
you probably have to hire someone on your team
to do this or hire someone to take care of this for you.
We'll give you some of the basics of using Google Analytics
and Google Search Console.
- All right, so I've never used Google Data Studio.
I'm super stoked to learn more about it.
I'm a little nervous because you said there's a lot to it.
- So it can be overwhelming.
So you just go over to datastudio.google.com
Luckily I've been here before, so it types for me because
I can't type.
And then it's going to have you sign in if you haven't done,
so already you click the button right there
and then you'd launched right into essentially
the dashboard.
Now what's cool about this is Google gives you a bunch
of templates to kind of look at and better understand it.
Cause if you, if you don't know what you're doing,
you want something already done for you could just kind
of pick and play with your own data.
- That works for me.
- Absolutely perfect.
So let me show you like a search console report
and what this kind of looks like.
You can see.
So for those of you that don't know Google Search Console,
it essentially tells you your search rankings
in information analytics.
So how often your page comes up with certain keywords,
how people click through it.
All sorts of great information on the search engines.
And that's what this is doing here.
So you can see how many impressions versus last 30 days,
URL clicks, which landing pages they've jumped on,
the queries they use like Google, Google shop,
clothing store, and then what part of the world they're in.
So you get all this information
- That's super helpful.
- And it's already created for you.
You can click "use as template" if you'd like to.
But again, if you have no idea where to get started,
those are your best bet
and then kind of pick and play from there.
We're actually going to make one from scratch.
- Oh boy.
- Are you ready?
- I don't know.
- I'm not ready, but let's go.
So we're going to go ahead
and click blank report right here.
And then it's going to ask you to add a data source.
Now it has some sample data if you'd like here,
but I've already added a couple of data sources
from a very old website I had way way back.
It was called "plans yet". The site's still live,
cause it's like all things you just want to keep it going.
- Yeah.
- So you click add your data source to add to that report.
And it's going to throw in some content here.
So right off the bat, it's going to throw in a table.
We can manipulate this however we want,
but it's going to show you the organic views.
None cause it doesn't know
what those source are coming from,
and then referrals things like social media, other websites.
But we're going to get rid of this because I want
to essentially make this pretty right.
Dashboards are supposed to be pretty and easily adjustable.
- Yeah, let's give it a makeover.
- Let's give it a make over.
Ah so we're going to have a cool little title.
Let's have a shape up here like so,
what color?
- Ah I would love to go for kind of like an ocean sea blue.
I was thinking like seafoam green. Oh, that's it.
- That's it. You are a California girl.
- Just throw some palm trees up there.
- And then we're gonna add some text.
- My awesome.
I told you I cannot type my awesome report.
And then on the right,
you have all your style properties
so you can manipulate almost every part of the elements
and graphs and data's that we put in.
You can modify and make it all pretty.
- Cool.
- So Obviously.
- Your thoughts are not that pretty though.
- I'm working on it.
- It looks cool.
- She's so demanding.
- Bold there, make it larger and white, it'll stand out.
It's crisp, that's aggressive.
- You're aggressive.
(both laughing)
We're being honest.
(both laughing)
Oh gosh.
Cool. My awesome report.
Perfect, right?
- Yes.
- Now let's actually add some charts and functions,
all sorts of cool stuff.
- Whoo.
- So you have your overall theme
before we jump into the charts.
So you can style it quickly if you'd like.
However, whatever works best for your brand
and your business, I know people that do this for service.
They usually make this into a nice report and I print it off
to their clients or send them to them that way.
It looks all pretty.
But we're going to choose
that dark background there and we're going to add a chart.
So a couple of cool things to you probably want to know
about with your site
is how many people are visiting your site.
So if you click add chart,
you can go to sessions right here
and it's gonna pop up sessions.
Now I can't see it. Oh I can see it, it changed.
Look at that.
- How did you do that?
- The themes and the styles, it all works together.
So it has my page views.
- It's like it know. It's magic .
- Something like that.
Google is smart, I guess.
- Very smart.
- But I wanted to still manipulate some things.
I want to add a border.
- Okay, so when we're looking at page views,
one point five thousand total ever in the life of this?
- So glad you asked.
So on the right hand side here,
you have data and you have style.
So style makes it all pretty,
data is the actual information it's pulling from.
And you can see down here, it shows the last 20 days.
- Oh, Okay.
- And if you want to do a comparison date,
you can choose none that will drop down there,
choose that we'll just do previous period.
And that's going to do the previous 30 days.
- Got it.
- Let that update.
So you can see there's a 24% increase in my page views.
Now I have that all nice and pretty.
And what's cool about this is if you want
to copy and paste it, you can right click, copy paste,
paste the same information in.
But I don't want page views and page views
and page views .
I mean as a business owner, I want page views.
but as far as data goes, it doesn't make sense.
- Yeah, so what else do you want to look at?
- So on the left hand side, right hand side,
right hand side of the left hand side, it's confusing.
I haven't had enough coffee,
(laughing)
but you can change the metrics.
So if I don't want page views,
I can choose something else down the page.
You can kind of go through and see what makes the most sense
for your business.
- But what if you don't know
what makes sense for your business?
- I use a template (laughing) and then learn from there.
- Hire a data person.
- No, cause there is a ton of information that it gives you
that you can kind of go around and play
with this and add different charts.
Like I can add a geographic maps.
I can see you where everyone's coming from.
That's probably a good idea except my target audience is
the U S.
- Yeah.
- But I see most people coming
from maybe the UK or Australia.
- What about if you are a local business?
And you would just want to know what cities or, you know,
within the neighborhood like who's coming
to my bar in North Park, in San Diego,
like are they coming over from, you know,
La Joya or University Heights or to help you know
where to market? Oh, you can get, okay.
- You can get super granular.
- Great. That was my question.
- Yeah, so under dimension right here,
you can change, there's city, there's continent,
there's country there's all different modifications
that you can add here.
- Yeah.
- As you can see that granular data,
like I'm getting a ton of people from Washington,
which is crazy cause we're in Washington right now.
- Yeah.
- And I'm from Texas and things like
that on a site that I haven't updated in a while,
but people are still going to,
and then there's lots
of other cool charts you can add here as well.
So if I want to see a time series chart,
I can pop that right there.
- But back to like analysis paralysis here, I kind of,
I am already freezing up just with all the options.
- Right?
It's it is a ton,
which is why I would kind of recommend going in
and add a chart and then seeing what it pops up by default.
So you can see kind of the information that it brings.
Like this will show a pie chart
of the organic versus referral
and then traffic that it can't understand.
But on the left hand side of this column here,
you can basically kind of go through and add all
this stuff like this Google Data Studio is complicated.
But if, as if you kind of take the time
to better understand it or at least some
of the data points or watch the tutorials, like this one,
or even use one of the templates to kind of start from.
All the information is there.
And then once you have it set,
it constantly updates and updates and updates.
So you don't have to modify it again.
That dashboard will always be there for you to customize.
- I like that cause then it's you know,
the work that you have done,
you can just build upon and save you time in the future
when you check like,
hey, you know what are my page views now?
Or and how much of this traffic was organic versus referral.
- Exactly.
- Which how do they know
what would be organic versus referral?
Just curious.
- So organic traffic is traffic
that came from search engines.
- Okay.
- So they're searching whatever keywords
that would pop up my website and they click on it.
Referral are links from other websites, which is common,
like social media or someone other blog
that has linked to your page, things like that.
- Okay, great.
Okay. So what I've gathered so far, yes,
this is overwhelming, but we're seeing a lot of data.
This is Google Analytics.
Can you pull any other data into this report?
For example,
we talk a lot about YouTube analytics.
- So yeah, if you wanna if you're modifying a page
and you want to add more data sources,
you can do that inside of this dashboard under resource
and then manage added data sources.
- So it does it all.
- It does it all.
So I have all website data here for Google Analytics.
I want to click add data source.
- Holy smokes
- You can see all of the data sources you can add.
Obviously Google is gonna let you pull
in all of their data into your dashboard.
- Nealey, I don't know what half that stuff is.
- Which is super cool.
YouTube is owned by Google.
So you can add that there.
But there's also partner connectors as well.
So it goes beyond just Google's data which is super cool.
So there's 162 current partners available.
It's like Amazon ads, AdRoll, AppNexus,
Sonic connector,
all sorts of things that you can pull into a dashboard.
So think of all of the different sites you go into now to
find different analytics, whether it's your sales data,
your website traffic, things like that.
You can essentially build your dashboard right here
and have your team modify it and things like that.
What's cool is that this is all done in the cloud,
if you will.
So people can modify it at the same time
and be in there at the same time.
- In real time, okay this is great.
Your report is in fact awesome.
There's a lot of information here,
but how do I use it for my business?
So for Coffee and KickFlips?
- Yeah I think the most important reason
to use Google Data Studio is
because it's essentially a one stop shop.
Once you have it all set up.
I mean think about how much time it's going
to take you to log into Google Analytics and then start
to look through all the information it gives you
from page views to bounce rates,
to all these different things and then search console,
then YouTube and then everywhere else.
Instead, you can have it in one dashboard
with the metrics that makes the most sense to you.
- Yes.
- If you're really focused
on increasing your website sales conversions you can have
that up here. There sales conversions, and then traffic
and then whatever makes sense for you in one place.
You'd only check it out once. You're good.
And you can spend the rest of the time
to do whatever you want, run your business "Coffee,
and KickFlips", go on a trip to Tahiti or Spain or Barcelona
or wherever you just got back from.
Do whatever you need to do.
- All right Nealey, that report was in fact awesome.
Are you feeling overwhelmed?
I'm feeling overwhelmed,
but hey if you have used Google Data Studio before
and you have some tips, comment below,
also be sure to like this video and.
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So you get these episodes first, this is The Journey.
We'll see you next time.