Last year, Google rolled out Data Studio without much buzz or fanfare. This year, it’s finally available to all users and offers unlimited reporting, so we thought now would be a good time to talk about it!
What is Google Data Studio?
If the thought of logging into Google Analytics and trying to make sense of all your traffic data overwhelms you, fear no more! With Data Studio, you can pull out a few of the most important metrics and save them in a separate report that syncs with your Google account and updates in real time.
Data Studio can be used to create reports that source data from Google Analytics, Search Console, AdWords, and other select Google-friendly sources. It’s not meant to *replace* these tools, but rather simplify and synthesise them – which is ideal when all you want is the bottom line rather than the nitty gritty on your search traffic.
Once you have your report configured, you can filter by account and date range, which is especially useful if you’re a Melbourne SEO agency reporting on SEO and AdWords data for multiple different clients or want to compare data month-over-month. Your report displays your chosen metrics for the given account and timeframe, all in one user-friendly interface.
By contrast, you’d have to manually click through multiple different sections in Google Analytics or AdWords every time you wanted to find all of this data. But with Google Data Studio, it’s all in one dashboard – too easy!
How to use Google Data Studio
The SEO specialists at our Melbourne digital marketing agency especially love the report templates that come ready-to-use in Data Studio. If you’re not quite sure what metrics you should be looking at, you’re in luck because these templates incorporate what the folks at Google deem to be the most important data, in a very visual and easy-to-digest format. We recommend you start with one of these templates and tweak as needed.
You could keep a separate report for each data source (e.g. one for Google Analytics, one for Search Console, one for AdWords) if you’re wanting to view lots of different data from each. Or, you could link up data from all 3 sources in 1 report and include a few metrics from each.
The Data Studio interface is fairly intuitive, but you will have to spend some time playing around with it to figure out how it works and what you can actually do with it.
For each data entry, you can choose what type of chart you want it displayed in, from table to bar graph to pie chart and more. Then, you can configure how you want the data grouped and what the default date range should be. Don’t worry too much about setting the default date range, though – you can always add a date filter to the top of your report which you can use while running it. This will override whatever you have set as the default.
