Marketing Reporting - 10 Benefits of Google Data Studio

What is Google Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is a powerful reporting and data visualization tool that is FREE from Google. You can use this tool to create multipage reports and dashboard. You can find Google Data Studio here.

Google Data Studio has templated reports but is fully customisable by using a blank report template and building your report / dashboard from scratch and containing only the data that is useful or interesting to you.

What Data Sources Can You Use?

You can use Google Data Studio to pull/connect data from many sources to generate reports. It will combine a variety of data sources into an easy-to-modify, easy-to-share, and easy-to-read report. The platform also features graphs, charts, and maps to visualize your data.

This includes directly from Google Analytics, Google Sheets, a csv file (spreadsheet converted to csv), e-marketing products like Campaign Monitor as well as loads of other partner connections like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. It has some great tools to be able to pull in samples of data to get you started.

Setting Goals, KPIs and Comparisons

Google Data Studio allows you to add scorecards which are good to show key performance indicators (KPIs). You can also compare metrics to a previous period, and it will calculate in a percentage whether your figures are up or down on a previous period. More recently, it now allows you to blend data from different sources into single tables or charts.

Making Your Reporting More Visual

Google Data Studio contains a whole heap of options to present your data in an easy digestible, more visual way including bar charts, pie charts, heat graphs, time series graphs and many more.

Dynamic Reporting

All data can have date ranges added to produce static reports for sharing, but what makes it even more powerful is that you can create dynamic reports where the receiver/end user of the report can change the date ranges etc. and can see data in real time. You can also allow the end user to filter reports by adding various filter fields. You can easily pull in multiple metrics within one chart to see the correlation between them.

Sharing Your Reports

Sharing options – you can download the report into a simple pdf and password protect it. Schedule a pre-timed email delivery of the report in pdf format. You can create a link to the report. Share it like any other Google document.

The whole interface is easy to use once you’ve done a couple of tutorials on it, with many of the menus similar to Microsoft products. There’s loads of training via GDS help tool and hundreds of YouTube tutorials out there to get started.

10 Benefits of Using Google Data Studio

1. It’s FREE! – Why pay for reporting software when you have such a powerful tool at your fingertips for FREE!
2. Freedom - You have immense freedom in how you create your reports and convey your data.
3. Huge Variety of Data Sources - You can pull data from a huge variety of sources through the main sources and through partner connections. Allowing you to report much more than just Google Analytics – making it a one stop shop for your digital marketing reporting needs.
4. Ease of Sharing - sharing the reports is easy – whether you want to download, email, schedule sharing or simply get a link, Google have built in every sharing option you will need.
5. Customisation & Flexibility – You can create one page or 20 page reports, it’ll adapt to your company’s needs or who your audience is.
6. Dynamic & Interactive Reporting – You can allow readers of your reports to pull real-time data and change filters, so they have a wide variety of reports at their fingertips and can interact with the report, rather than it being just static.
7. You Don’t Have To Be An Expert – It has templates already created to help you and comes with templates for specific industries as well.
8. Loads of Online Training – Nobody is an expert to start with, but there are loads of training tutorials offered directly from Google via the help menu and loads of YouTube tutorials to be able to teach yourself about the tool.
9. Data Blending – Following many requests to Google, Data Studio now allows you to ‘blend’ or ‘combine’ multiple data sources into a single chart or graph.
10. Saves Time & Resource – For smaller companies or marketing teams without loads of free data or digital marketing resource, gathering data and reporting can be time consuming. Once you’ve invested some time in learning to use GDS and set up reports, reporting regularly is painless and can be done quickly and efficiently.

Summary

The beauty of Data Studio is that, once you’ve done some basic training, decided on the metrics important to your business and set up some reports, creating regular, useful and engaging reporting is easy. Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE! ??