In this video you're going to learn how to create dashboards in Google Data Studio, including
adding elements to your dashboard and customizing your data.
I'll also cover the benefits of using Google Data Studio to visualize and present data
from Google Analytics, as well as Google Sheets.
I'm Benjamin and I'm going to help you get the most out of your data to improve your
website and online marketing.
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Let's get started!
We'll jump into Google Data Studio in just a moment, but I just wanted to really highlight
the key benefit of using Google Data Studio over, say the standard reports or the dashboard
options inside Google Analytics - and that's really that what we're doing is we're creating
something that's very dynamic.
So with the dashboarding options we can add in things like a date range selector, so that
when people are actually engaging with the dashboard they can manipulate the data they're
finding in a live scenario.
So let's now have a look at a couple of dashboards, so we're going to actually create these two
dashboards today.
First we're going to create this audience overview dashboard and I'm actually going
to walk-through the steps that I went through to create this dashboard.
So it has some key pieces of information - so there are top level metrics along with trends
for this particular website.
We can see we've got some trending, and some comparison, as well as some details about
the pieces of content that people are engaging with on the actual website itself.
And we can also see that date range selector, so actually making it dynamic inside Google
Data Studio.
So this is the first Data Studio report we will look at creating.
The second Data Studio report we'll look at is this one.
This is actually combining data from some different Google Analytics reporting views.
It's actually combining four different sets of data to recreate a report inside Google
Data Studio because this is one of the other key benefits of Data Studio - is that we're
not just looking at one piece of data we can actually supplement additional pieces of data
in, so, for example, in this case I'm actually combining data from four different sets of
Google Analytics views, but we can also do things like add in additional pieces of data,
for example, from Google AdWords or from YouTube or anything that we can pull into Google Sheets,
as well, so this is a really key benefit for Data Studio.
So let's jump in now to Data Studio and have a look at the interface.
So here what we can see is the home section of Google Data Studio and across the top we
can see there's some templates or some sample reports you'll actually also find these down
here inside the interface, so you'll actually jump in and you'll find that this is the same
in all the different Google Data Studio accounts.
And also see up the top here I've created a few dashboards myself, so these are my dashboards
that I can also find inside Google Data Studio.
And we can see here we can flick between ones that I own or ones that are shared with me
and on top of that we can also come down and see the different data sources, so we'll talk
about this in a moment, but basically we can pull in some sample data.
For example, from the Google Analytics demo account, but of course we're going to be supplementing
in our own data, so pulling in data from our own Google Analytics accounts.
From our own Google Sheets and so on.
So from here I'm going to click on 'start a new report' this is going to kick things
off and we're starting from scratch inside Google Data Studio.
So our first step is to select a particular data source, so we can actually use one of
the sample ones.
For today I'm going to use the sample Google Analytics data from the Google Merchandise
Store, but you also have the option, of course, to come down the bottom here and actually
pull in your own data set from your own Google Analytics or Google Sheets and so on.
So let's kick off I'm going to click on Google Analytics data and I'm going to add this to
my report.
So now I can begin actually editing my report, so the first report I'm going to create is
the audience overview report and this is going to be in landscape, so I just need to modify
this report.
So click on 'file', 'report' and 'theme settings' and then just on the right-hand side here
I can click on 'layout' and I can just change this to portrait so it's a more classic style
reporting template.
So next up, I need to add my elements into my Google Data Studio report so I can see
across the top you have a range of options - pie charts, trend lines and so on.
You'll also find these on the 'insert' drop-down as well, so it's up to you - use whatever
you're more comfortable with.
So for me, I'm going to start off with a scorecard this is basically a straight metric so I can
just drag and drop, and this will now add this element into my canvas, so here we can
see I have the number of sessions and this was pulled directly from the data source I
selected which was the Google Analytics sample data.
So I can now change the particular metric I see so I'm going to click on 'sessions'
which is the default and then we can see all the different metrics that are available here,
so I can pull in data from AdWords or goal conversion data from Google Analytics, all
these sorts of things.
The search option is super helpful you'll find that this helps speed up your creation
of dashboards.
I'm just going to click on the 'search' option and so now I want 'users', so I come down
and select 'users 'and this will update the score card or the metric inside the canvas
here.
Some other things I can do - so I can just click back and one thing that can be super
helpful is having a date comparison, so we can actually do comparisons of the metric
we're seeing here, so 61 thousand odd users in this example to the previous period.
So that would be the 28 days prior to the date range we're looking at.
Or ideally this is the one we'd want to go with is previous year so the same date range
from the previous year so I can select on this and we can see now it's going to update
and we can actually see that we have that comparison with, so year-on-year actually
up 32% in terms of our user figures from Google Analytics.
I also like to add the detail back in there just for context, so you can click on 'style'
and I just like to deselect 'hide' so this tells us straight away inside the interface
we are looking at a comparison to the previous year.
So it's our first element we've added into our dashboard and we can move that around
on the grid as well.
So another nice thing is we can copy and paste so you can just do this on your keyboard or
you can also go through and 'copy' and 'paste' and this will paste that element back in,
so now we can actually use this to create additional scorecards, so in my case, in my
audience overview scorecard, I want to add in pageviews, bounce rate, and some other
engagement metrics.
So I can just go ahead now and actually modify the data so I can just come back through follow
the same steps to find the pieces of data I'd like to add in to my Google Data Studio
dashboard.Now
that I have all the elements I want, I can move them around.
I can just drag and select the elements and just make sure they're aligning in the way
I want.
And now I can go ahead and add some additional element to my dashboard.
So I'm going to add a pie chart with details about the different channels that people are
using to find my website.
So now I can come in, again uploading the sample data up, I'm going to change the dimension.
In this case, to default channel groupings and since there's a lot of data here I'm going
to go back and I'm going to adjust some things here, so I can actually come back, click on
'style' and I'm going to reduce the number of slices down to six so the top six channel
groupings.
And you can also make this a donut chart, so I can just pull that to the position
and now I'm going to go ahead and add in a bar chart, this time I'm going to use the
bar chart to show the different devices people are using, so again select where I want to
put it.
I can come back select my data, so I'm going to use the device category for this one.
And now I can adjust this bar chart so I can come back in, I can say I want 'horizontal'
and I can also just remove the elements and I can just make it a little bit bigger so
now I can see the different devices people are using to find and interact with the website.
So next up, I'm going to create a trendline so I'm going to come up and I'm going to use
the time series option and I can drag that across.
And now I'm going to look at users, so I'm just going to modify this to 'users'.
And I can also come back in and do a few things, so I can actually do a comparison to the previous
year right within the trendline.
And I might even just make a slight cosmetic change, I'm going to add in the points for
each spot on the chart.
And finally for the data I'm including in this dashboard, I'm going to include some
details about the pages people are engaging with so I'm going to include a table.
So now I can add in the details that can come in to data for me I'm going to include our
'pages' or the page.
So now I can see the different pages people are engaging with I can come back in and I
can add in additional metrics, so in this particular case I'm going to switch 'sessions'
to 'pageviews' instead.
And I'm also going to add in another metric which is 'bounce rate', an engagement metrics.
So now I can see this inside the report.
And the other thing to note, and you'll see this when we jump into the live example, is
you can still tab through the different results here, so we're just looking at the top ten
but you can certainly travel through and view the other ones.
Now there are some other things that we can do with the report, so we can actually do
things like this so it can actually come into the columns and I might want some visual detail
about the page using this particular instance, so I can click on 'bar' and this is going
to mean that I can see a quick bar chart and I can also choose to include the number so
now I can see not only the number of pages, but I have this visual reference to understand
the how that sort of adds up in the scheme of all the different pages people are engaging
with.
The other thing that you may have already noticed is the heatmap option, so here for
example with Bounce writer can quickly highlight pages that have a higher bounce rate, so you
can use the heatmap option to quickly highlight those particular metrics that have a higher
value, in this particular case.
So now I have the basics down for all the metrics and dimensions that I want inside
my dashboard, so you can see they're all here and from here my next step is really to just
clean this up in terms of the design, so I'm going to add in a header and just some other
elements to make sure that it's nice and clean and crisp for the people I'm delivering it
to, so I can go ahead and I can do this.
So for example, I can add in a bit of a header so I can just drag a rectangle in so I can
add this in I can change the color and then I might sort of move my different elements
around, so just clean them up a bit.
And I can also add in additional text to give my report a heading.
On top of this I can also add in a date range tool, so this will basically make the report
more interactive.
It will mean that people can actually come in and manipulate the date range they're looking
at for my dashboard, so here I can actually click on 'data' and I can select the default
so I might say my default is say the last 30 days of data and click on 'apply'.
So now what will happen is people can actually come in and modify the data that's available
inside this rolling report.
If you want to have a look, just click on the 'edit' toggle so this now gives us our
live report so we can see our dashboard and you can see that it is interactive you can
actually tab through the different pieces of information we've included in the dashboard,
and importantly, I also have this option now to manipulate the date range I'm looking at,
so I can enter in the start and the ending date and now the report will actually refresh
for me.
And I can come back in and edit the report again, and I can come back in and continue
to tweak it until I'm happy with my dashboard report.
And now I'm happy with my final dashboard report inside Google Data Studio.
Now we're going to look at how we can actually combine different sets of data, in my example
I'm going to combine different pieces of Google Analytics data to create a report across four
different websites that I've done here.
So you can actually if you've got the overall trend at the top and then coming down I can
actually hover over and see the performance broken down by the different site.
So to do this I'm going to need to use Google Sheets to actually aggregate this data together
for me to combine it into Google Data Studio, so let's jump into Google Sheets.
So here in Google Sheets what we're doing is I'm actually using the Google Analytics
add-on to actually pull in data from in this case four different websites from Google Analytics
and I'm just pulling some basics details, so I'm just pulling the session numbers across
these four different sites.
So what we can see here is, we're pulling this data and I can see I've got my number
of sessions and it's now going to, in the final sheet, here, actually combined them
all up.
So now I've got the number of sessions for each of my sites and then the total number
of combined sessions and we're going to be pulling this data into Google Data Studio
now, so let's head back into Data Studio.
Here I can create my new report, so I'll just click on start a new report and now I need
to pull in my data from my Google Sheet so I'm going to click on 'create new data source',
and you can see here all the different options we have available for pulling data into Data
Studio.
Lots of Google products of course, from analytics we've looked at through two AdWords and for
me I'm going to use Google Sheets because this gives me huge flexibility in the data
that I can pull in.
So from here I can see the sheets I have access to I'm going to click on the one that I want
which is 'combined data example' and I'm going to use my combined worksheet out of that particular
spreadsheet, so now I can click on 'connect' and now I have the different details that
I'm pulling in and I'm just going to click on 'add to report'.
So now, for my example, I'm just going to keep it simple today, I'm going to create
a time series with my combined data for all those four different websites being measured
into Google Analytics.
And straightaway I now have that data available right within my Data Studio report.
This gives me, now, my total trend for all four sites combined, so absolutely great way
to actually combine different data into a report using Google Data Studio.
So from here I can tweak things of course, I might want to make some slight sort of tweaks.
You can also of course, add in things like a trendline, if you choose.
So I can add that in, and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add in this additional
element around the, actually splitting it apart.
So I can actually quickly hop over and see for that particular day you know how much
traffic came from website one two three four and so on.
So now I'm going to add in a new element into my report.
So for this I'm going to use the bar chart, and I'm just going to pull it in, so I can
see here I can pull in additional metrics.
I'm going to combine these up here.
And so I'm just going to add them all in.
Now I have my four metrics and I'm going to stack this chart.
So now I can see the makeup for each date, and I can actually come in...
And now I can see I have my data coming in as I want.
So it's a great example of actually combining different pieces of data into Google Data
Studio and you can see here Google Sheets is a great way to pull in custom data.
So that's how you can use Google Data Studio.
Tell me how you're using Google Data Studio.
Let me know and leave your tips in the comments below.
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