Google Data Studio: An Introduction

What is it?

Google Data Studio is a free data visualization tool that allows users to build dashboards and easily share those dashboard with others.

What data sources does it connect to?

Out of the box, it connects natively to many different data sources

• Google-Owned Products

  • Google Ads

  • Google Analytics

  • Google Sheets

  • YouTube

  • BigQuery

  • Google Campaign Manager

  • Google Ad Manager 360

  • Display & Video 360

  • Search Ads 360

  • Google Search Console

  • Google Cloud Storage

  • Google Cloud Spanner

• Databases & File Uploads

  • MySQL

  • PostgreSQL

  • .CSV file upload

In addition to native connections, Google Data Studio has 200+ connectors developed and maintained by partners that allow you to connect directly to a number of sources including:

• Facebook Ads

• Facebook Page Insights

• LinkedIn Ads

• Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads)

• CallRail

• AdRoll

• Amazon MWS

• AppNexus

• Centro

• Choozle

• Constant Contact

• Criteo

• Hubspot

• Quickbooks

• And more

Why is it great?

Over the years, great data visualization and reporting automation tools have had high barriers to entry. Typically you'd need a large budget to cover not only the cost of a tool (or a whole stack of tools), but also the salary of the people maintaining it. In addition, it could take months or years to begin to see any value from your steep investment.

On the other hand, the cost of continuing to maintain large, complex spreadsheets is a cost that companies can ill-afford to keep paying. Sunk hours of downloading, copying & pasting, and updating vlookups for ad-hoc reports could be better spent using data to make decisions.

Google Data Studio is FREE. As long as you can supply the data, Google will let you visualize it in their tool for no additional cost. Also there is no cost to share your data with anyone who needs to see it.

Google Data Studio is familiar and highly customizable. Many other tools (paid & free) may offer a lot in terms of features and power, but you're stuck with a rigid template or have to be a coding wizard in order to get your dashboard to look the way you want. Rearranging and customizing the look and feel of your Google Data Studio dashboard is as simple as dragging, dropping, re-sizing, and changing fonts & colors as you would do in a PowerPoint (or Google Slides) presentation. On top of this, you can easily add drop-down filters and date range selectors for users to interact with the data on their own.

Re-arranging your report is as simple as drag-and-drop.

How do I get started?

Simply go to Google Data Studio, connect to a data source, and create a report.

If you have any familiarity with Pivot Tables, or with tools such as Tableau, Domo, and Power BI, the interface should look similar.  You select your desired visuals, and then drag and drop fields until your visual accurately communicates your story.

What data can I visualize with it?

As mentioned above, you can connect to and visualize data from just about any data source you have. The Google products integrate seamlessly without much manipulation required, and then if data is prepped in an external database somewhere, it can easily be connected and visualized within Data Studio.

Need to display how many views your YouTube channel gets daily? Use the YouTube connector and create a trend line.

Need to know Cost per Conversion for each of your Google Ads campaigns? Use the Google Ads Connector and create a bar chart or table with those metrics.

Need to track spend vs. budget for your DV360 campaigns? Blend your DV360 data with your budget in a Google Sheet and use a Gantt chart from the community visualization library.

Have a mobile app powered by a PostgreSQL database? Use the PostgreSQL connector and create a map showing what states or countries your new users are coming from.

The bottom line, is that as long as you supply the data and structure it properly, Google Data Studio can help you visualize it.

What are some useful features?

Sharing and embedding

All reports created in Google Data Studio can be shared in the same way that any user can share a Google Doc or Google Sheet. Simply click the +Share button, and select whom you are sharing the report with. You can also make any report accessible to anyone who has the link.

All reports can be embedded on another site or in an internal web application.

We've created a client-facing report for a company who provides information to clients behind a secure login.

Calculated Fields

This one is a pretty standard feature in all reporting and visualization tools, but Google Data Studio keeps all fields (calculated and non-calculated) in a single location on the dataset. This allows for ease of management of those fields. For example, if I need to calculate 10 different fields on my dataset I can easily do so before creating a single visual.

Creating a calculated field is simple in Google Data Studio

Drill-down

Google Data Studio allows you to drill down to view a particular data segment on just about any visual. For example, if you have a table with performance grouped by week, you could potentially drill down to see data by date for a particular week or data by date for all weeks in the table.

Drill down from week to date, category to sub-category, etc.

Row-level security

This is an enterprise-level feature hiding inside a FREE tool. You may have a dataset that contains data for multiple clients, but you only want client A to see client A's data. By adding a field containing client A's email address on client A's data, if client A is logged into her Google account with that same email address, she can only see her data. If she's not logged in, she will not see any data.

Include a client’s email address in your dataset in order to maintain security while achieving scalability.

We actually utilized this feature on the same embedded report mentioned above so that multiple clients could access the same report but still only see their own data.

Metric comparison

In 2020, some PAID tools still do not offer an easy way to do metric comparisons out of the box. If I wanted to create a table showing this month's data and then show the percent change vs. the previous month, I'd have to create a bunch of CASE statements and not allow for changing date ranges, etc. Google Data Studio absolutely knocks this out of the park. We can simply select "Previous period" from a drop-down menu, and BAM! You can even get fancy and choose to not compare certain metrics within your table.

Comparing metrics over time is simple.

Change your date range, and see that both the metric and the comparison numbers change.

Community Visuals

A number of third parties have created cool and useful visuals that live outside the realm of what Google has already created for us. Gantt charts, sunbursts, metric gauges, radar charts, and more already exist and can be added to any report you create, and if you don't see what you need, you can develop it yourself!

What are some limitations?

ETL not Included

Google Data Studio is solely for visualization. It does not include an ETL tool to prep your data, so if you're combining data from multiple sources (i.e. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Google Analytics) into a single dataset, you'll need to do your data prep work elsewhere. While this in itself is not a bad thing, it is noteworthy for expectation setting.

Fusion75 uses tools such as Xplenty and BigQuery for prepping data prior to visualizing it in Google Data Studio.

Alerts missing

While Google Data Studio is awesome for reporting and visualization, it falls short of being a full-fledged business intelligence tool. For example, a platform like Domo can proactively send alerts stakeholders via email, text message, and push notification if a particular metric changes by a certain percentage.

Drill-down customization

This one is nuanced and may not be a big deal for the vast majority of users, but when drilling down on a visual, you cannot drill down to another type of visual. For example, if I wanted to click on a single week in a table, and have the resulting drill-down be a pie chart breaking down traffic by device type, I would not be able to do so. I can only drill down to another field within that same table.

Manual Refresh

There is no real-time auto-refresh. This one is not a huge deal, because the manual refresh is one click, but if you're dealing with real-time data, you may not want to have to keep clicking the refresh button. Some third-party developers have developed an auto-refresh solution that refreshes the report on user-defined intervals (i.e. 5 seconds, 1 minute, etc.), but these solutions are not maintained by Google and could potentially stop working after a platform update.

CASE Statement limitations

With calculated fields, you cannot include a function or reference an aggregated field inside your CASE statement. Some paid platforms allow you to do this, but Google Data Studio does not. You can, however, create a non-aggregated function and reference that field within a CASE statement, but there is no solution for aggregating a metric within the WHEN clause of a CASE statement.

Is Google Data Studio right for me?

If you're asking yourself this question, chances are that Google Data Studio is a solution worth trying out. If any of the below statements apply to you, it's definitely worth at least a look:

• I currently email spreadsheets back-and-forth with clients and/or my internal team.

• I don't have any automated reporting solution in place.

• I have a reporting solution in place, but it's very rigid and reporting views are not able to be customized.

• I like Google Drive/Docs products and wouldn't mind a user interface similar to those interfaces.

• I would like to automate my reporting, but don't know where to start.

• I would like to automate my reporting, but don't have an enterprise budget.

If any of the above are true, or if you tried Google Data Studio but got lost, Fusion75 can help. Don't hesitate to contact us!

Google Tag Manager - Getting Started

**This article has been updated in January, 2021 to reflect the change that replaced Preview Mode with Tag Assistant. For familiarity’s sake, this post shows how to install the Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) tag. Once GA4 becomes more ubiquitous, we will update this article again to install GA4 via GTM.

Everyone has already told you that Google Tag Manager will make your life easier, but how do you get it on your site? Luckily it's very easy to install Google Tag Manager (GTM). We'll discuss how to set up your Google Tag Manager account, install GTM on your site, and adding & publishing the Google Analytics Universal Analytics tag.

Setting Up Your Google Tag Manager Account

Go to Google Tag Manager and make sure that you're signed into the Google Account that you want to use (or create a new one here).
Click the Create Account button to create a new account

Fill in the appropriate information for Account Name and Container Name; select the Target platform (Web if this is for your website) and click the Create button

Read and accept the Google Tag Manager Terms of Service Agreement. At this time It is also advisable to check "I also accept the Data Processing Terms as required by GDPR."

Installing Google Tag Manager to your Site

After creating the account and container, you will immediately be greeted with a prompt to copy & paste some code onto your site. Follow the instructions and paste the code from the top window as high in the <head> as possible on every page of the website. Next, paste the code from the second window immediately after the opening <body> tag.

A couple of words to the wise…

1. DO NOT SEND THIS CODE IN THE BODY OF AN EMAIL!

2. DO NOT SEND THIS CODE AS A MS WORD ATTACHMENT!

 If you must email this code to someone else, paste it into Notepad and save as a Text (.txt) file before attaching to email. Sending in the body of an email or in a Word document may result in formatting that breaks the code.

Google Tag Manager and your Content Management System

Since we are well-past the Web 1.0 era of static websites, chances are that your site is built on a Content Management System (CMS). The process for installing GTM to your CMS may vary, but in most cases the process is straightforward. In many cases, your CMS may have an easy integration with Google Tag Manager, and you only need to copy the container ID (looks like GTM-XXXXXXX) into your CMS to get started. See below for some helpful links on installing GTM on popular CMS platforms:

• Wordpress
• SquareSpace
• Shopify
• Magento
• Drupal
• Joomla

Installing the Google Analytics tag to your GTM container

Now that Google Tag Manager is installed on the site, let's install your first tag. I'll assume that you already have created your Google Analytics account, or you are using an account that already exists. If you still need to create your account, go to Google Analytics create your account before proceeding.

In your Google Analytics Account, click Admin at the bottom of the left-hand-side panel.

Then click Tracking Info >> Tracking Code and copy the Tracking ID that you see on the screen. It will look something like UA-123456789-1.

Go back to your Google Tag Manager window. We now need to create the Google Analytics Settings variable using this tracking ID. To do so, click Variables on the left-hand-side panel, and then the New button in the User-Defined Variables box.

Next, give the variable a unique name like GA Settings, and then click inside the Variable Configuration box to select the variable type. After you do so, a panel with a list of different variable types will show up on the right side of the screen. About 3/4 of the way down this list will be Google Analytics Settings.

Click on it. Then input your Tracking ID that you just copied from Google Analytics. Then click Save.

Next, we must create the Google Analytics Tag. On the left-hand-side panel, click Tags, and then click the New button.

Give this tag a unique name like GA Universal Page View, and then click the Tag Configuration box to select the tag type. Next select the Google Analytics: Universal Analytics tag which should be the first option in the right panel.

Leave the Track Type as Page View. In the second drop-down menu, select the variable that you just created.

Next, we'll need to apply a trigger to tell this tag when to fire. Since this is our universal page view tag that should appear on all pages, we will select the default All Pages trigger that is already created in your GTM account.

Now our tag should look like the below. Click Save.

Tag Assistant (Formerly Preview Mode) - Your Bestest Friend in the Whole World

Almost there! It's always a good idea whenever adding a tag to verify that the tag is firing before publishing it to the live website. A 2020 update has changed (for the better) how we QA our tags. We perform this QA by using what is known as Tag Assistant. Tag Assistant records the entire session across pages instead of showing you what happens individually on the current page. To enable Tag Assistant, simply click the Preview button near the top right of the page in GTM.

Next, a new browser tab will open, and you will be prompted to enter a URL. Enter the URL where you would like to QA your tag(s), and click the Start button. You should also leave the box checked that says "Include debug signal in the URL" unless adding this parameter would break your website.

In a third tab, you'll be taken to the page that you entered. You will notice that gtm_debug=x has been appended to your URL if you left the box checked in Tag Assistant.

Also you'll notice that there is a message that pops up in the bottom-right of your browser window that says "Debugger connected."

Now you are ready to verify that tags are firing. Back in the Tag Assistant tab, you should see a panel taking up the majority of your window. In that panel, you should see a summary of the tags that have been fired on this page, and the tags that have not been fired on this page. Since we configured the GA Universal Page View tag to fire on all pages, this tag should appear under the Tags Fired On This Page section.

To further verify that it is firing on all pages (and that GTM is installed on all pages), go back to the tab with your site and navigate through a handful of pages. After going to a few pages, go back to Tag Assistant and confirm that the tag appears in the "Tags Fired" section for each page. Seeing activity for each page is as easy as clicking on the page title as it appears on the left-hand side of Tag Assistant.

NOTE - after you're done QAing your tags, don't forget to exit Tag Assistant by clicking the X at the top-left of the window and then clicking "STOP DEBUGGING."

In order to save yourself a step for next time, check the box that says "Keep the domain [yourdomain.com] enabled for debugging."

After you've verified that GTM is installed, and your Universal Analytics tag is firing properly, it is time to take a deep breath and publish to the live container on the website. To do this, click the Submit button near the top right of the page.

Then enter a name and description summarizing the changes you made, and click Publish.

That's it! Now that you've installed Google Tag Manager and deployed the Google Analytics Universal Page View tag, you're able to see data populating in your Google Analytics account when users begin visiting your site.

 You now also have the ability to add more tags, triggers, and variables. Google Tag Manager is a very powerful platform, and once you understand how it works, you can use it for so much more than just adding the GA Page View tag to your site. Our team has been installing and customizing GTM for years and can help you take your site tracking to the next level.