The first step in building an engaging Google Data Studio dashboard is to use
the funnel approach for your dashboard structure.
In the past years, the human attention span has dropped to 8 seconds.
So this is a timeframe in which your
dashboard will will need to engage the person looking at it.
8 seconds.
Let's take a look at two examples.
Do we want to start with a grid
that throws us at once a lot of data, or do we want to provide the information
that the user came for as fast as possible?
The answer is a complete no brainer.
We want to make the data accessible, easy to grasp and digest.
The best dashboards use a funnel approach
and display the most significant metrics in the top section.
And then, while this is not the rule, I usually use the next section with two
goals in mind, show trends, fluctuations, and then reveal what led
to the performance displayed on top in a more granular way.
To show you what I mean on this dashboard, we are answering how many total contacts
we had last month, and it took probably less than 3 seconds
to see that how many per stage new free paying lapse trials churned.
Then we're uncovering the time frame of each contact through each stage,
for instance, one day from new email to trial, and then we are understanding
from what sources and campaigns they came from.
This is the funnel approach,
but other dashboard makers for example, Josh Cattle that wrote a great article
on Supermatrix about how he builds most of his dashboards, uses a pyramid approach.
The foundation is the same.
It will help you visualize going from broad to granular.
Another important mention here.
As you can see, we try to keep it simple and decluttered.
It's tempting to cover numerous metrics
and directions, but you want to keep away from generating reporting fatigue.
And speaking of reporting fatigue, let's go to the next point.
Make the experience interactive.
Creating a dashboard that only contains numbers is a good way to work a dashboard
that's going to be checked at best once per month.
How can you make sure you prevent this?
Try to include elements that are helping the end user engage with the content
on the page the same as they would do when navigating a website.
A basic way to do this is to put
Data Studio's interactive features to use like the optional metrics.
For this chart,
you can see either an overview of all the three goal completions,
or select through individual goals and see what the user has done on the website.
How do we enable optional metrics?
We go into edit mode.
We select our chart here and you will see
in the metrics section that we have this toggle here.
Optional Metrics and you can add up to ten optional metrics.
You can go here and add multiple.
After that you can go into view mode and see.
All the metrics that you set up in the backend.
Another great option are the drill downs.
We have this table here, that is, let's say, Google Ads data split by day,
but we want to see this data drilled up from day to week.
This is how it looks like.
We have this button here, and if we click it again,
we'll be able to drill further up from week to month and from month to year.
How do we enable drill downs?
We go back into edit mode,
we select our chart, and this time we stay into the dimension section and we have
this drill down toggle here that we are enabling.
You can do this with dates as we did
in this example, or you can, for example, drill up and down from campaign to ad set
to add or other groups that contain each other.
Please notice that we're also using this
little GIF here as a visual indicator of how the user can interact with the chart.
Another great built in feature is the cross filtering.
In our example,
we have a geochart accompanied by a table, and if we select a certain country,
we will have the data dynamically populated in this table.
Let's see how you can do this.
First thing, go into edit mode,
then go to your two charts and make sure you group them.
We have them already grouped, so make sure that you select them both.
You group them, and then you go to your
geochart and scroll all the way to here and enable crossfiltering.
And of course,
you can also break the stream of numbers with all kinds of community
visualizations, but we'll cover those in another video.
The third part of creating an engaging GDS
dashboard is to prevent boredom with dynamic elements.
This last part refers to inserting here and there in your dashboard.
Dynamic elements that disrupt the high
quantity of information and draw more curiosity or are simply fun.
One of my favorite ways of doing this, especially for platforms like
Facebook Ads, where we have images and we can extract the ad preview link is
to overlay the ad images over a device, mockup.
Mix it with the interactive cross
filtering that we talked about earlier and you have a playful way for the user
to see what image generated the highest ROAS, for example, how can you do this?
Again? We go into edit mode,
we select both of our tables and we group them, and then we go at the table level.
We scroll all the way down.
As we discussed in the previous step, we enable cross filtering.
The second table, the one with the image.
Yes, it's actually a table with no date
range dimension, and we have only one dimension, the ad link and no metrics.
Don't forget to select rows per page,
only one because I'll show you what happens if we select more.
Because we have multiple rows here with multiple ad names.
We will see all the images in that table and our fake UI will show.
Okay, so back to one row and we go back
to the Dimension, the ad link that we format as an image from here.
For the phone mock up, you can use any kind of phone mock up
that you can find on the internet, but make sure you have a vertical mock up,
not a tilted one like this because you won't be able to use a table on them.
And make sure that it's a free for commercial use image.
Using the same method of a device mockup,
we can also insert the top reviews or on the contrary, the lowest score ones.
Everyone is interested to listen to their
customers, so this section will definitely receive attention.
For this section,
we used a community visualization for customer reviews created
by Baguette Engineering and also this Google Sheet that will act as the data
source with the respective data structure that the community visualization is asking
for, which is review date, review ID, review name, comment and rating.
And this is how the end product review will look like.
Here are the data fields that we have in the Google Sheet as well.
You can extract your reviews in Google Sheets through an automation
tool or directly through your reviews tool the last dynamic elements we're talking
about today are emoji and meme reactions based on your metrics.
For the first one, we're going to Zoom in a bit and you'll
see the different emojis added by revenue levels.
So I can either indicate that my revenue
is not that great or that my revenue is really strong.
This next one is inspired by Michael Howeilly and his article on how
to use meme reactions on gifts in Google Data Studio Reports.
Same as above, just that this time we're using Jim Carrey.
We can see that we have a great revenue or
that we really don't enjoy the revenue that we obtained.
Both types of reactions are case when formulas built with revenue levels.
The only difference is that the emoji one is wrapped in an image formula
and with all this in mind, you are ready to build an engaging dashboard.
One last important mention,
please double check and triple check your data accuracy, especially when you're
using data blending from multiple data sources.
You can even do a couple of calculations
manually to see if your formulas are correctly set up.
All right, folks, that was it for this video.
I hope you found it useful see you in the next one.
All right, thanks, Andreea, for this great information.
If this video helped you out in any way,
then hit the like button and also check out this playlist right over here where we
have more interesting topics on Data Studio and Data Visualization.
Now from everybody here at MeasureSchool. Happy measuring.