What are Google Data Studio dashboards anyway?

Google Data Studio, also known as Data Studio, is a tool for reporting and data visualization. It can visualize data from up to 500 different sources with 220 connectors, including including Google Analytics, and combines them into an easy-to-edit, easy-to-share and, if thoughtfully designed, easy-to-read report. With Google Analytics, the Google Tag Manager should be connected upstream to extract the maximum amount of meaningful data. The platform also offers widgets, graphs, charts and maps to visualize your data. With Google Data Studio, your team can save time and money by creating, reading, editing and sharing reports in minutes. The ease of use and versatility of Data Studio will help your organization and your team make faster decisions while achieving better results.

How much does Google Data Studio Dashboards cost?

The tool itself is free! This is a huge advantage over other reporting systems. While other systems can cost thousands of dollars, which ultimately cuts into your bottom line, Google continues to address the needs of marketers and business owners by offering a free solution for data reporting. However, complex dashboards can take hours and days to create. A good design is essential and data sources need to be reconnected from time to time, which can be a bit of a pain. With Google Data Studio, however, you have a relatively simple, free and user-friendly platform for explaining complex data sets.

10 reasons why Google Data Studio is popular for dashboards

1. access to unlimited widget options

Unlike Google Analytics, which only allows a maximum of 12 graphs or charts in a report, Google Data Studio allows you to include any number of widgets. This feature allows you to share and explain your data in different ways.

• Heat graphs by region, state or country
• Pie charts
• Time series charts
• and many others

You can also modify any of these widgets with a variety of metrics. With Google Data Studio, you have immense freedom in creating your reports and submitting your data. For this reason, the Data Studio is becoming an indispensable tool for companies.

2. retrieve data from many different sources

Probably one of the most unique and helpful features of Google Data Studio is the ability to choose from up to many different data sources to consolidate into your reports. This means that you can retrieve and merge data from multiple relecant platforms (Cross Channel or Multi Channel). Here are some examples:

• Google Analytics
• Google Ads
• YouTube
• CloudSQL
• Search Console
• and many more

Use these platforms to create a report that explains all aspects of your activities.

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A screenshot of the Google sources available in Google Data Studio.

This feature makes Data Studio a one-stop store for your reports and ensures that the reports look incredibly professional. Don't miss the opportunity to impress your company's decision makers with this free tool and demonstrate the value of digital marketing (including SEO, SEA and PPC measures). Thanks to Third Party Connectors, even more sources can be accessed:

3. easy sharing of Data Studio dashboards

When compiling or reviewing data reports with so many data options and metrics, you may want to quickly get the opinion of your team members, your dedicated account manager or the decision maker in the organization - without any extra effort. Downloading and sending files is a waste of time, especially if you want quick feedback. Google recognized the need for sharing, so it built the same sharing features into Google Data Studio as its other tools, such as Google Docs. With Google Data Studio, you can share a link and allow others to view and (if they have the know-how) customize the reports. Even better, this feature allows you to make changes in real time while sharing. Your whole team can view the same report and make changes at the same time. This aspect of shareability is a massive time saver for companies and marketers!

4. create easy-to-read reports for everyone

You can split Data Studio reports into one page or 20 pages, demonstrating the flexibility and customizability of Google Data Studio. It adapts to the individual needs of your business and makes sharing critical data a stress-free process. You can also customize the layout of your reports. It's easy to change fonts, colors, themes, sizes and more to make each report easy to read. You can also add between one and multiple widgets per page. This layout allows you to give team members and company decision makers insight into your activities from all angles.

5. dynamic reports in dashboards

While you can make real-time changes with your team, you can also allow Google Data Studio to pull real-time data into your reports. You can also set your reports to update automatically and populate your widgets with current data. If you want a few widgets to display current information, you can do that, but you can also keep data sets up to the last few months. This dynamic report offers you unlimited data options.

6. build interactive experiences

Your widgets can also come to life! Your graphs and charts don't have to remain one-dimensional. Share your reports and let business managers click and change reports to see the information they want. This interactive feature makes it easy for users to visualize data.

It also complements the endless customization options available with Data Studio.

7. free dashboard templates for Google Data Studio

Not an expert in Google Analytics or reporting in general? No problem! Google Data Studio already has templates that have been created to support your reports. The platform comes with pre-installed templates for Google Analytics, YouTube, Google Ads and many others. There are also templates for specific industries such as e-commerce.

This feature makes it easier to create dashboards, often making it quicker and less painful.

8. learn with free Google Data Studio tutorials

Nobody starts out as a Data Studio expert. That's why Google offers training courses that you can combine with the templates to make your work easier. Google offers videos, tutorials on reports and tutorials on data sources. You can access the Data Studio Learning Center via the Help menu. Even if you don't create the reports yourself, these resources can help you better understand exactly what your business does and give you an insight into how innovative Google can be in the reporting space. If you need additional help, you can also visit the Google Data Studio forums.

9. embed Data Studio reports in social media

If you've always wanted to publish your reports on social media, from Facebook to Twitter, you can now do so with Data Studio. Using the platform, it's a simple process to embed the reports you might want to share to demonstrate an achievement, experiment or study.

10. embed Google Data Studio reports into your website too

I am interested in a Lookerstudio Dashboard from Oplayo: Send me a non-binding request

Simply embed a piece of code from the report into your website.

How to use the Google Data Studio

When you're ready to get started with Google Data Studio, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Data Studio with your Google account
2. Click on the "Create" button in the top left corner
3. Select "Data source"
4. Link data sources, such as Google Analytics
5. Back to the Google Data Studio dashboard
6. Select the "Create" button in the top left corner
7. Select a "Report"
8. Select the data sources to be imported on the right-hand side
9. Edit the layout, theme, colors and more of the report
10. Click on "Share" in the top right corner to share the report

If you want, you can use templates from the "Template Gallery" in the Data Studio Dashboard as described above. Experiment with templates and custom reports in Data Studio to get the best results and learn what you can do with them.

Google Data Studio and the Google Search Console

The new Google Search Console's Performance Report offers a much friendlier way to visualize your sites' key organic search visibility data. Although limited - especially for larger websites - it is the most reliable source of ranking information from Google. This is especially helpful when it comes to analyzing the impact of ranking updates. Nevertheless, the Google Search Console report is quite limited compared to Data Studio. You may have looked at or used this Google Studio template. It's very helpful, but it's better to create your own template based on your needs and metrics that is "recyclable". Especially if you don't want to customize the template every time. However, you should integrate the following into your own template:

• A data control that allows you to easily switch between properties and display the data for each website in Google Search Console
• Filter controls to visualize metrics per query, landing page or device category in the report, if desired
• A date range selector to visualize and compare the data for your desired time range
• A summary of the most important metrics - impressions, clicks, CTR, average position - for the selected time range, including the visualization of the difference compared to the previous period, also showing a time series for the impressions, clicks and average position, making it easier to see when the trend changes
• A table with the most important landing pages of the website, including the ranking of search queries and impressions, clicks and CTR as well as the difference to the previous period.

With such a template, you can not only view the data from the Search Console better, you can also recognize insights better and generally analyze them better.

A few suggestions

You can organize both queries per click and impressions and then according to their positions. This allows you to quickly discover the most important queries with problems, e.g. those that have declined despite more impressions, or those that rank lower despite the same number of impressions and clicks (e.g. because search behavior has changed).If you want to specifically analyze the behavior of certain queries, pages or devices, you can do this with the filter controls, simply select them as you would in the Google Search Console. For example, you can select a search query that looks like it has decreased in ranking, then in clicks, to see which pages rank for it. This way you can find problems such as cannibalization of two or more pages. The Data Studio can also be used with SEO tools such as Sistrix can also be combined: