Getting Started With Google Data Studio: A Beginner’s Guide

Creating client reports is the worst nightmare of any marketer. It requires creating spreadsheets, pie charts, result overviews and various other significant elements that need to be reported in a manner easily understood by clients.

Since Google aims at solving the problems of digital marketing experts, search engine consultants, etc., and create unique tools to do son. Google Data Studio is one such unique reporting tool developed by Google that aim at simplifying the report generation process for digital marketing experts, saving their time and resources.

 Google Data Studio is a free data visualization tool launched in Mid 2016 in beta mode and has been operating out of beta since 2018. Google Data Studio aims at syncing all your data sources into a single and systematic reporting experience. Via this tool, marketers can create informative and visual dashboards that can be easily interpreted, shared and customized.

Why Should Marketers Use Google Data Studio?

1. Google Data Studio is free to use by all marketers
2. It easily connects to almost any data source, be it Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
3. It involves real-time integration features
4. It is a consistent and on-brand tool
5. It is a fully customizable tool
6. It is time-saving and helps marketers focus on real actionable insights.

Getting Started With Google Data Studio: A Beginner’s Guide

Creating a report using Google Data Studio involves you to follow the following steps:

1. Pick A Template

The very first step involves marketers to pick a template for creating their reports. Luckily, Google Data Studio provides you with an array of template for getting started with your reports. For new user, you must pick a data template that aligns with the type of data you want to portray. All templates allow you to customize items and fonts for creating consistent and detailed reports. You can even add multiples pages to your report instead of creating a compact single-page report.

Every client has their own reporting goals and needs, and Google Data Studio allows you to create reports distinctive to your client’s reporting needs.

Digital Marketing experts can create templates specific to SEO, PPC, and Social Media and tweak them according to client needs.

2. Connect Your Data Sources

Google Data Studio has endless data connectors that allow you to add your data sources to your reports instantly. Via data connectors, this tool easily syncs all your manual tasks and syncs all the data for you.

Once your data gets synced, you can easily choose to add these data sources at the beginning of your report or later wherever you need them. Click on Add Data from the toolbar to add your data sources.

However, there is a downside to third party connectors that help pull in additional data like social data, etc.

1. Extra Added Costs
2. It Can Slow Down Your Reports
3. Metrics can be deprecated. It is essential to stay on top of any changes in your report and rebuild your metrics if needed.

3. Choose The Important Metrics Of Your Report

All marketers know the importance of metrics. You want your clients to see and understand all the essential metrics. Ensure to add critical metrics that your client cares about. Add spend and revenue metrics for clients caring about ROAS. 

For including brand awareness metrics, including pre-built metrics like impressions, clicks, CTRs, etc.

 4. Share Your Reports Created Via Google Data Studio

Review your reports before sharing them with your clients. 

The below-listed options are available for sharing:

1. Invite via email (Users must have a google email account and can be sent to view or edit permissions)
2. Anodyne with the link can view it.

The Google Data Studio offers prominent features like

1. It prevents editors from changing access and adding new people
2. It disables downloading, printing and copying options for users.

How To Build And Edit A Report Via Google Data Studio

1. Select Proper Visuals

The very first step of building reports is to select the data visualizations you want to use.

Via navigating the toolbar to insert, you can select from a vast selection of visuals like 

1. Time Series
2. Table
3. Pie Chart
4. Score Card
5. Time Series

     And much more.

2. Editing Various Data Formats

The editing panel of Google Data Studio is situated on the right, and you can edit the look and feel of your report quickly with it.

You can personalize the font and background colors, change your comparison metric colors, text alignment.

The style changes will automatically get applied to all sections saving more time!

Add Report Filters

3. Add Report Filters

You can add a report and page filter for grouping multiple visualizations together. It means that your report will contain multiple pages, and whenever the data range gets updated, all chart data updates alongside it. In case you want to know about Device type performance, you can filter that too.

Navigate to Insert>Filter Control and add the dimension of “Device” as your filter. 

There is also a filter for reviewing data by network type.

Digital Marketing Services In Mumbai

GBIM Technologies, a digital marketing agency in Navi Mumbai, offers top-notch digital marketing services in Mumbai. Our digital marketing experts are equipped with the skills required for working with Google Data studio and believe in generating reports and analysis that our clients can easily understand. We simplify the reporting process as much as possible and provide valuable and performance-driven reports to our clients.