Previously it would have been really hard to configure a dashboard based on a time backward
or forward based on the date that is today.
Luckily, there is a new functionality within Data Studio which is called the advanced date
functionality which will now find in all the date pickers that we have in Data Studio,
and I asked Ahmad to come up with a little tutorial to show off this new feature and
how we can utilize it inside of our dashboards.
Now, we've got lots to cover so Ahmad, take it away.
Thanks, Julian.
This is Ahmad from Siavak.
And in this video, I'm going to walk you through the advanced stage selection feature in Google
Data Studio.
This is a fairly new feature.
And now let's dive in and see how it works.
This is a blank reports that I've made, I've already added a data source.
And let's create a time series chart to see what options do we have for selecting the
date range.
But this is our time series chart.
We want to see the number of sessions over time for this website.
And by default, the date range that is applied to a chart in Data Studio is auto A means
last 28 days.
We have other options as well.
So we can choose for this to show other period of time by using custom.
Let's see what options do we have.
The first one is fixed which is simple.
Instead of last 28 days, we can choose this supports to always show for example, May 1st
to May 14th.
And regardless of the date that the end-user access this chart and views this report, they're
always going to see the report of the first of May to the 14th of May.
This isn't dynamic.
But we have some dynamic options as well which are based on the actual date that the report
is being accessed.
Just like this last seven days, last 14 days, last 30 days.
And not last 30 days according to today, it is based on the actual date that people access
the report.
These are the options that we kind of always had in Google Data Studio.
So it's this week, last week, this month, last month, this quarter, last quarter.
But what if we wanted to set the date range for this chart to two months ago until two
weeks ago.
So we couldn't do that.
Or let's say we wanted the last three weeks, not including the days that have passed from
this week.
We couldn't do that either.
But with the new Advanced Data selection feature, we can do this and lots more.
Let's see what it means.
First of all, we need to select the start date.
For this type day, we can choose fixed which is a fixed date.
So let's say, for example, we want first of January 2019 until last week, every time we
want to load the reports we want to see the first of January until last week.
This is how it's done.
So the first day would be first of January, fixed and end date with me today, minus one,
not one day, one week, and we can choose a starting and Sunday or Monday as well.
So when I applied this, whenever a user accesses the report, whenever they're viewing the report,
they would see the report is starting from first of January, going to the last week,
not including the days that have passed from that week.
Now let's do something else.
Even for the start date, we can have some dynamic value.
So let's say we wind from four weeks ago, to last week, that would be today, minus four
weeks till today, minus one week.
We can also have this with quarters, with years, or with months.
So from three months ago, to one month ago, minus one month.
Today, which is the first of June, it loads from the first of February till the end of
May.
That's cool, isn't it?
Now let me show you another usage for advanced time selector.
Let me add another this time, scorecard.
And for this, I want to see the average order value.
Let me delete this one.
So we just take a look at the average order value here.
Okay, this is the average order value today for instance order last 28 days.
Okay.
But let's think about this hypothetical situation that the client wants to see the performance
of their website in terms of average order value over the last seven days compared to
how it used to perform from first of January up to last seven days.
So basically, they want to compare last week to the whole period of time from the first
of this year to that point.
For this, we want to first set the custom date range for the actual value of this scorecard
to be from today, last seven days.
Okay, we wanted to show the average order value for the last seven days.
And then we want to compare it to the average order value from the first of January, up
to eight days ago.
For this enabled the comparison, for the comparison, historically we had fixed we had a previous
period, which is our last seven days compared to the seven days before that, or from the
same seven days of the previous year.
But now we have advanced and we can choose this time to be fixed.
And for this situation, we want it to be first of January.
And to end date would be today minus seven days.
If I apply, I will have a comparison.
So this is the average order value for the last seven days.
And it's down from the average order value performance over there up to last seven days.
But this is not clear.
So let's go to style it, uncheck this so it actually shows us what's the main value is
being compared to.
So domain value is minus 1.3%.
down from what we had from first of January to 21st of May.
And by the way, you can show absolute changes as well.
So it is nearly $3 less than the average order value that we had from first of January to
21st of May.
So as you can see, not only we can use the advanced date range feature for the main scorecard
or the main charts that we're using, but also we can use it for a more flexible date ranges
for the comparison with previous date ranges.
That's it.
Thank you for watching and see you on the next video.
Bye
All right, so there you have it.
This is how you can utilize the new advanced date feature within Data Studio.
Now, do you actually utilize this already?
Or do you have a good use case I'd love to hear from you down in the comments below.
And if you want to find more out about Data Studio about different features, functions,
and so on, we have a playlist on Data Studio right up there where you can find out more
with more tutorials.
And as always, if you liked this video, why not give us a thumbs up and don't forget to
subscribe to our channel because we bring you new videos just like this one every week.
Now my name is Julian, see you in the next one