In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a Data Studio account and connect to
your first data source Google Analytics demo account. Then we're going to review the Data
Studio interface, learn how to visualize data using charts and graphs, and how to share
our reports with others.
Hi, this is Ahmad. And this is the first lesson in Google Data Studio essentials. Let's get
started. If you haven't used Data Studio before, you need to create an account first. To do
that, go to Data Studio google.com and click Use it for free. And then you'll need to log
in with your Google account and follow the steps to create your free account. Data Studio
has two main components, data sources and reports. Here on the homepage, you have access
to view and manage every report or data source that you've created so far which shared with
your accounting Data Studio. Your reports and the reports that I shared with you can
be found here in the reports tab. You can search your reports, or you can sort them
based on different criteria. And when you find your report, you can share it, you can
rename it, or you can remove it. Similar to that all the data sources that you've created
or that are shared with you can be found in the data source system. Plus, in the reports
tab, you can find some templates here under the template gallery, which can help you get
started, or you can start with creating a blank report. Let's create a blank report.
When we create a new report, we're immediately prompted to add a data source to the report,
we need to use a Data Connector to connect to and extract data from a data set and make
that data available in the report. Our data set can be in a marketing or analytics tool
such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Facebook Ads, or in a MySQL database or in a data warehouse
like Google Bigquery, or it can be simply in a Google Sheet or a CSV file. So for example,
if our data set is in Google Analytics, we need a Google Analytics data connector to
connect to it. If it's in Google Ads, we need a Google Ads Data Connector. If it's in Google
Sheets, we need a Google Sheets Data Connector and so on.
We can use one of these data connectors to connect to our data set and make the data
set available in our report. I'm going to connect to Google Analytics. And when you
click on a Data Connector, such as Google Analytics, it will list all the Google Analytics
accounts that you have access to, so you can choose from them. Here, I'm going to choose
the demo account, which is the Google Analytics account for Google merchandise store. And
it's publicly available to everyone. And then I'm going to select the property and select
the View. And finally click Add to create this data source and add it to my report.
If you don't already have access to Google Analytics demo account, I'm going to show
you how to get access, it only takes a few steps, you just need to search for Google
Analytics demo account. And it's usually the first result you click on the results. And
then you scroll down over here and click access to demo account. Then you will be redirected
to your Google Analytics interface for where you need to agree to the terms to get access
to the GA demo accounts. Okay, so let's go back to our reports.
Now that we have connected this report with data source, we can see the data studios report
editing interface. At the top we have the report title, which we can click on and rename
it to something more descriptive. My first report and then at the bottom, we have the
menu bar. And underneath we have this toolbar. And then here in the middle, we have this
blank workspace, which is called the report Canvas. We can see that there's a table added
to the canvas when we added the data source to our reports. We can right click on this
table and any other chart in Data Studio to quickly get access to all the menu items that
are specific to that chart. There's a sidebar at the right that when nothing is selected
will give us access to the properties of the report. And when a chart is selected, it gives
us access to the properties of the selected chart or whatever is selected on the report.
For a chart, we can view and control the data that appears in the chart in the Data tab
in the sidebar. And then we can change the appearance of the chart in this time tab to
decide how exactly do we want our data to be visualized. At the top right, we've got
this Share button that gives us access to different sharing options in Data Studio.
And finally a button that lets us toggle between the edit mode and view mode in Data Studio.
Now that I clicked on it, I switch into the view mode in which we can preview our reports
as if we were to find a user of the report. This is the way are the people that you share
the reports to can view and track with your report, and we can click it to go back to
the edit mode.
The Data Studio report is created by placing charts, graphs and other components on this
report canvass on this blank workspace in the middle. Let's add a few charts to see
how they work. So I can add a scorecard here. I can add a time series chart, a bar chart,
and map and the pie chart. Notice that all of these charts are getting the data from
the Google Analytics demo account that we added to this report earlier. We can select
the charts, we can move them around, we can resize them, we can copy and paste them And
we can remove them. Our report is ready. Let's take a look. It's not the best looking reports,
but it's good. Now let's see what options do we have to share this report with other
people. So Data Studio reports can be shared just like a Google doc or a Google Sheet.
Let's go ahead and try to share this report. We can either share the report with a specific
people by entering the names or email addresses like this, or we can click manage access to
create a link to this report. In both cases, we can decide if we'd like to allow people
to only view the report. For example, if you're sharing the support publicly or with a client,
or if you want them to also be able to edit the report, for example, if you're sharing
it with a colleague to help us out with a report. I'm going to create a public link
with the view access to this report and copy the link to the clipboard and save it. Now
I'm going to open an incognito window to test the link. As you can see, I'm not logged into
Data Studio anymore, and the link allows me or anyone to view this report. There are a
few other ways to share this report which are specific to Data Studio and are accessible
through this little downward arrow beside the share button. Other than sharing the access
to the report with the specific people, or creating a public link to the report, you
can also schedule a PDF version of this report to be emailed to specific people at a specific
intervals. Let's see. So here, we can choose this report to be emailed on a daily, weekly
or monthly basis, or just on every weekday. Or we can directly download the report in
PDF format to our computer. Feel free to explore each of these options on your own.
So far, we learn how to connect to a data set, visualize data in a canvas, and share
the report with clients or colleagues. In the following lesson, we'll dive deeper to
learn how to connect to different data sources, how to clean and transform data, and how to
visualize different types of data to create beautiful reporting dashboards that people
actually use and love. See you in the next lesson. Next, we're going to learn how to
connect to and extract data from different tools, and how to use calculated fields to
clean and transform our data before visualization. Did you learn anything new today? You can
either test your knowledge by taking the quiz for this lesson, or continue to the next lesson.
Both links can be found in the descriptions below. If you're new to measureschool, make
sure to subscribe so you can get notified of future videos that we publish. And if you
have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.