- In this video your going to learn how
to build dashboards with the help of Google Data Studio.
You're going to discover how to import data,
visualize it, and share with our stakeholders.
All the more coming-up right after this.
(funky electronic music)
Hi there, and welcome to another video of measureschool.com,
where we teach you the data-driven way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian,
and on this channel we do tutorials,
how-to videos, and take a look at the latest marketing tech.
Just like this one.
So if you haven't yet, consider subscribing.
Now, looking at data in Google Analytics
can become overwhelming really fast.
You have so many reports,
so I usually recommend using it
only as an ad hoc research tool,
and not to actually present your data,
and findings to your clients or stakeholders.
The route we usually go
is to pull data from Google Analytics into other tools,
such as a Google Sheets,
to analyse, and then visuals, and show to our clients.
We made another video about this
that you can check out in the description below.
But if you're searching for
an easier point-and-click dashboard solution,
you might want to check out the new Google Data Studio.
With the introduction of the Google 360 Suite,
we also got access to this tool for free,
to build our reports and dashboards.
So it's time to take a look
at this new piece of marketing tech.
We've got lots to cover; so let's dive in.
(funky electronic music)
- [Narrator] Today our journey starts at,
datastudio.google.com
where you will get access to the beta version
of this new product of Google.
Now, with this free version
of the Google Data Studio software
you will only be able to build five reports,
but it will give you a great overview
about the tools you can use with Data Studio.
Now, before you'll get started with building a dashboard,
I would actually encourage you
to think about the audience you're trying to reach,
the purpose of the dashboard, what data should be on there,
and maybe even sketch it out beforehand
so you know what you're looking for in the tool,
and what data you need in the dashboard
to build it with the help of Google Data Studio.
Now, in our case I want to show you the functionality.
So we're going to build
a general digital Analytics Dashboard,
and we'll use the data of the Google Analytics demo account;
that you can also get access to.
I will link up the instructions in the description below.
So you might be familiar with
the dashboard function within Google Analytics.
This is pretty limited,
and we now have the ability
to pull the data from Google Analytics
directly into Data Studio,
and build our dashboard there.
So let's do that.
First of all you can choose from a variety of templates.
Some are good some are not so good,
but what we want to do here is start with a blank report,
and the first thing we need to do
is actually pull the data in that we would require
to build this dashboard.
So google gives you, actually, some sample data
that is available if you want to try it out.
You can also use your data connectors,
and build a new data source.
Now, these connectors are basically the ability
to directly connect to the data source.
A lot of Google products here,
but we also have some more open capabilities.
Such as the ability to connect to MySQL database
or to Google Sheets,
where you could really import any kind of data,
and do any kind of calculations that you might want.
For now we'll go with Google Analytics.
We need to authorize our account.
Which means our account needs to have access
to the Google Analytics account
in order for us to pull the data into data studio.
If that's the case you can choose here your account,
and your view, and where you want to pull the data.
Connect this all, and you will get an overview
of the dimensions and metrics that can be pulled.
Now, this is pretty standard.
Google Analytics obviously integrates very well
with Google Data Studio,
but if you would link up a MySQL database
or a Google spreadsheet
you might need to define the fields, the type,
and give it a description so you'll be able
to identify your fields,
and your data that you're working,
with in the interface later.
As I said this is pretty standard for Google Analytics
so let's add this to the report,
and we are good to go to start building our report.
Now, this is the blank canvas that we will be working with.
By default, it is in portrait mode.
Let's change that over by going to the theme settings here,
and as the layout I want to choose landscape.
This is normally what I would use to work with.
Now we can start building our visualizations
we have different tools available up here.
Better described, also here under insert,
and you can simply choose one,
for example the scorecard here,
and draw it on our canvas.
Just like this.
This will connect to Google Analytics pull the data out,
this is happening live,
so you have the most recent data in here,
and also filled, already,
a metric that you might want to use.
If you don't want to use it,
you can simply go to the metric and change it around.
For example, the Users here.
You can also heavily customize this,
if you, for example, want to compare it,
give it a bit more context,
you could add a comparison here to the previous year,
which will add this little date range comparison
to your graphic.
It's also easy to then go ahead,
and copy-paste this into your document.
Again, align it and then change it over
to the next metric that you might want to display.
Now, let's go ahead and use another visualization type.
Let's go to insert here, and use the time series,
and draw something on our canvas again.
Some data is fetched;
now we want to change this data around.
I want to, actually, know the Users here again
so I'll change the metric,
and I actually want to
give this a little bit more context again,
and compare this, so I add another metric
which are our Transactions.
Now, this is a bit hard to read,
so let's style this a bit more,
you can customize your visualizations, to a certain degree.
Not everything is possible,
but certainly the basics are there.
You can change, for example, this line chart here
to a bar chart, and also put another axis in
so that it all gets a bit clearer.
The same is possible with our other bar charts here;
that we can utilize.
Let's make a country comparison here.
So instead of looking at the Source
we will look at the Country,
and, again, look at Users,
maybe add another metric,
which would be new verses old.
So that is now added to this chart.
Again, we can customize this
to get to the style that we want.
And even change stuff around
inside of the visualization its self,
until we get our data to be like you want it to be.
Then we can go to another visualization type,
a table is often used in data as well.
So let's try this out, draw a data table.
Just a little bit small here.
So we can always change the element,
by dragging and dropping it,
and also customizing the data,
again, that is seen here.
We have here sessions,
let's say, we want
to have the Conversion Rate next to this, as well.
So let's look for Conversion Rate,
and it will be built.
You can also change the order here if you want to
by, again, dragging and dropping your metrics.
I'll make this a little more clearer. Great.
And if we want to highlight some details here
we can also go into Style, and edit this column.
We can, for example,
put in a heat map for column number one.
That will show us the data here,
now it's not as readable anymore.
Let's change that around.
And in the end, we'll have a nice little table,
that let's us know all the data that we would need to know.
Again, it's easy just to copy-paste that
if you want to have another data roll,
exactly the same formatted.
Let's put this over here,
and change this around.
Next what I want to do is, actually,
pull another metric here for our scorecards
out of a different data source.
So let's copy that over, next to it,
and let's go back here to our data,
and we don't want too use Google Analytics anymore.
Let's try something else.
Let's go over here and create a new data source.
I've already prepared a Google Sheet.
Now, this Google Sheet
could be any data point that you want to import.
I have here a number of calls and the date range,
so let's import that.
Connect it all up,
and we get our familiar screen here.
Google Data Studio did a great job
of finding out that this is a date type, and a number here,
and we can edit all to our report.
This will be connected.
Obviously we need to change, here, our metric.
Now the date range doesn't go as far back,
to see what the change was here.
So importing data from a different data source is possible,
but you would need to use another visualization.
You're not able to, actually,
mix data with different data sources.
Another feature that I want to show you
are calculated metrics.
So you might know this feature
from Google Analytics it's self
What you can also do
is calculate metrics directly within Google Data Studio.
So for example if you wanted to have a transaction per user
we would be able to calculate this
because it's not in there by default.
Let's go into metrics here,
and we'll create a new metric
that will be Transaction per User,
and we simply need to put in a formula
which we can do by start typing
the metrics that we want to calculate.
So in our case it will be Transactions divided by Users.
We can simply create this field,
and it's now available for us to pick from the stack.
So this is a great feature, again, to customize our data,
all-in-all it's a bit hard to clean,
and transform your data,
and that's why I would actually recommend
to pull it into a spreadsheet first,
do your calculations there,
and then push it out to Google Data Studio.
Now, the last thing to do is to add a little bit of styling,
and clean-up a little bit of the visuals here.
So we can use some of the styling options
with the rectangle here.
So you can draw, actually, into the canvas,
some design elements.
Let's do this really quickly.
It changes a bit more to the style of Measureschool.
Upload an image.
Change a bit of the formatting.
Alright looks good to me.
Let's look at our end product.
We can go here to the edit mode,
and you could see this is something I could share already
to my friends and colleagues in order to inform them
about the performance of this demo account.
Now, one thing that is missing is, actually,
a little bit of interactivity, So
we already see that we have controls
when we hover over certain data points.
That these are interactive,
and we can kind of see what's going on,
but if you want to give the user control,
and this also depends on our data story,
If you want to do that,
then we can build that in as well.
So let's go back to the edit mode here,
and build in some controls.
There are, actually, two controls, right now,
that you can build in.
One is the date range picker.
This is the same, that you can see from Google Analytics.
Basically gives you a date range.
We would need to change a bit of colour here,
so that it's visible,
and if you go into edit mode
we can select our date range,
and we could say we're going to have the last 30 days.
Apply this, and this will pull the data,
newly from Google Analytics,
and update all our visualizations, here.
So very handy
when it comes to giving the user interactivity
to dig through the data themselves.
We can also edit in filter options.
So let's do this really quickly.
We can use this further control field.
Now by default this is a checkbox list,
but we can also change it into a dropdown menu,
just like this,
and give the user a choice which data he wants to look at.
So for example
here I would like to let him sort this by the Source.
So he can filter out dynamically, Source.
We would need to connect this back
to our Google Analytics data,
and the dimension here would be Source,
and Source Medium,
and the metric we are looking at are Sessions.
Let's change the styling of this.
Now if you go back to our view mode here
we can actually get a drop down list
of all the important fields,
and if you only wanted to look,
for example, Google/cpc data, Google AdWords data.
We can automatically, reload our report,
and update the numbers,
and then see how our store is performing
or how our website is performing.
Only looking at that data source.
So very handy,
if you want to give interactivity to your users.
So let's say this is done,
and now we want to present our data.
What are our capabilities here.
So first of all you can at any point share the report,
even too collaborators to work with you on this dashboard.
So you can invite them and give them added access,
you are the only one who can delete it
because you are the creator of this report,
but you can invite somebody to access this report,
and edit it with you.
You can also invite people to view that report,
if they have access to Google Data Studio,
they would be able to play-around with the data,
only the interactions we have defined on the page itself.
Now you can also do is actually get a shareable link,
and this will enable you to take this link
put it into an open intranet or send it around to friends.
Again, here you can view or edit,
the same options that you would have
with a document in Google Drive.
Now currently their is no possibility
to actually embed your dashboard into an intranet
or onto a client's page
or into another dashboard that you might have prepared.
Maybe that's another functionality that will arrive soon.
Another capability is to actually print this out as a PDF.
So if you're in view mode, you can go ahead,
and print this whole thing
by opening up your print settings and saving it as a PDF.
Unfortunately you would need to do this
with every page that is out there on your report.
Now we'll make this little dashboard I have built,
it's not very there could be some more tweaks
that we could make to it,
but anyways this was a demo
that I wanted to give you for the capabilities
of this dashboard tool.
I will make this available to you in the description below.
So you can actually copy it,
and implement it to your data source.
If you might choose so
or if you want you can also go ahead,
and go over to the Data Studio Gallery.
Which features some really cool visualizations of data
that were built with Google Data Studio.
All of them are also free to open copy into your account,
and then run your numbers on them.
In the end don't forget to give your report a name.
Share it to your colleagues or your friends,
and I hope this was useful so you can get started
building your own Google Data Studio dashboard.
(funky electronic music)
- So there you have it this is how you can import data,
visualize it, and share it with your clients,
and stakeholders, With the help of Google Data Studio.
If you are already using Google Data Studio.
I'd love to hear your experience in the comments below,
and as always if you like this video
please share it with a friend or colleague,
and subscribe to this channel
because we'll bring you new videos every Wednesday.
My name is Julian, till next time.