A Guide to Google Data Studio
Overview
What is Google Data Studio?
Google Data Studio is a visualization tool that allows you to discover insights in your data and communicate your insights to others. With it, you can translate data into useful dashboards and reports that tell the story behind the numbers.
The platform can be used for a wide variety of business contexts, from marketing and sales to tracking productivity and progress. Essentially, if you have a set of data, Data Studio can be used to create visualizations about it.
Google first introduced Data Studio in 2016 as part of its Google Analytics 360 suite, developed to allow customers to track and optimize Google marketing campaigns.
What are some advantages of Google Data Studio?
A main advantage of Google Data Studio is that it’s free. If you have a Google account, you can log into datastudio.google.com and get started. The platform is based in the cloud and runs on any browser.
Naturally, Data Studio integrates well with other Google products like Google Sheets, Google Analytics, and Google Ads. You can also upload CSV and Excel files or connect to MySQL database tables. When data sources have live connections to Data Studio and the data is changed or updated, those changes will be automatically reflected in Data Studio visualizations.
Because Data Studio features Google’s intuitive design sensibility, you may find it relatively easy to get started with making Data Studio dashboards.
What are some challenges with using Google Data Studio?
As noted, Data Studio is designed to integrate with other Google products. You may have some issues, however, when using non-Google software. For example, if your data is in Excel, you will need to first upload it to Google Drive as a Sheet and then connect that file to Data Studio. As another example, if you wish to use Hubspot as a source, you will need to find a third-party connector to import the data into Data Studio, and not all these connectors are free.
While Data Studio will update visualizations to reflect changes in a data source, the updates are not instantaneous, and the lag can vary from 15 minutes to several hours.
In addition, Google Data Studio does not have the range of features and complex visualizations possible with other visualization tools like Tableau and Power BI. It also does not offer personalized support. You will need to rely on help pages and other sources to troubleshoot issues.
Considering that Data Studio is based in the cloud, you may encounter typical problems with cloud-based tools that rely on the Internet connections such as issues with dependability, security, and so on.
Create Visualizations with Google Data Studio
Getting Started
- After logging into your Google account, go to datastudio.google.com.
- Click on “Blank Report”
- You will be asked to connect to a data source.
For this guide, I’m choosing Google Sheets and connecting to a file called sales_sample_data, which concerns the sales of toy cars, motorcycles and other vehicles to hobby stores and which I uploaded to my Google Drive account. This data is a public sample dataset found on Kaggle (source). (I made some edits to the data in date column.)
- Click “Add” to add a worksheet from this spreadsheet to the report. Immediately, Data Studio will open up to the first page of the blank report and create a default table. (This table can be deleted.)
Overview to Adding Charts
- In the tool bar, click “Add a chart”
A drop down will display different types of charts to add, including:
- Table
- Scorecard
- Time series
- Bar
- Pie
- Google Maps, etc.
Click on your desired chart, and it will appear on the page with default data from your source. You can move this chart to the desired position and resize it as needed.
The Properties Panel
When you have a chart selected, a properties panel will open on the right of the screen. This panel has two tabs:
- Data — allows you to change the data source, the chart’s metrics, data types and other aspects
- Style — allows you to change labels, colors, reference lines, text styles and a number of other features, depending on the type of chart
In the Data tab, two important fields are Dimension and Metric. Dimension refers to what you wish to measure, and Metric concerns the actual numbers.
Creating a Table
Task: Create a table regarding the number of orders coming from various countries.
- In the tool bar, click “Add a chart”
- Choose Table and place it in the report
- Replace the default-added field in Dimension with “Country” by dragging it over
The default metric is “Record Count” which counts up all the orders from each country, giving us this chart:
It is interesting to see how many total orders come from each country, but many of those orders are likely from repeat customers. To add another column to show the number of unique customers from each country, drag “Customer Name” as another metric.
Now the chart looks like this:
The column header names can be changed by hovering the mouse over the metric until a pencil icon appears. Let’s change them to “Total Countries” and “# of Unique Customers.”
These changes are reflected in the column headers.
Use the Style tab of the panel to change fonts, alignments, colors, borders, and other attributes.
Creating a Bar Chart
Task: Create a bar chart to visualize the most popular product lines.
- In the tool bar, click “Add a chart”
- Choose Bar and place it in the report
- Replace the default-added field in Dimension with “Productline” by dragging it over
- Replace the default-added field in Metric with “Quantity Ordered” by dragging it over
- Add “Sales” as a second metric
Google Data Studio populates the canvas with this bar chart:
Notice how the chart has both a left and a right y-axis. The left one measures “Quantity Ordered” and the right one measures “Sales.”
Use the Style tab of the panel to change the axes, bar colors, bar orientation, and other aspects of the chart.
Creating a Time Series Chart
Task: Create a time series chart to visualize sales throughout the year of 2020.
- In the tool bar, click “Add a chart”
- Choose Time Series and place it in the report
- The default-added field in Dimension is “Order Date,” which is what is wanted for this chart
- Replace the default-added field in Metric with “Sales” by dragging it over
Google Data Studio populates the canvas with this time series chart:
In the source data, the dates range from January 2019 to May 2021. To select orders only in 2020, scroll down on the Data tab in the panel and change the Default date range from Auto to Custom, click on Auto date range and use the calendar that pops up to select the desired dates.
The time series chart now looks like this:
This chart of the daily sales does not provide a lot of insights. To change the chart to monthly totals:
- Under Dimension (not Date Range Dimension), hover the mouse over the left side until a pencil icon appears
- Click on the pencil to gain access to a series of menus that will allow you to change the Date to “Month”
Google Data Studio changes the time series chart to monthly totals, and one can now easily see that the most sales occurred that year in November, likely so the clients could stock up before the Christmas rush.
Creating Additional Charts
While this guide has covered tables, bar charts, and time series charts, a similar process is used to create and customize other types of charts.
Troubleshooting
Google does not offer any direct support options with Data Studio when you run into trouble or have questions. To find answers, the best tactic is to search online for your issue, and you’ll find official help pages, community forums, and video tutorials.
