Data Studio: Google’s Native Option for Data Visualization
I have had several conversations with fellow marketers where they tell me how still in 2020, they use Excel or Powerpoint documents to review data from their digital campaigns and Google Analytics reports and generate insights. Clearly all this data is retrieved manually and then displayed in graphs. Would you believe me if I told you that you can automate this operation through a completely free Google tool? That’s right, its name is Data Studio and it’s Google’s native data viewer.
What is Data studio?
Data Studio per se is a data visualizer. In it we can see for example from clicks, costs, CPC (Cost Per Click) of our campaigns in Google Ads, to data of users, audiences, visits and devices of the people who enter your website. It is completely free, however for services that are not native to Google if a connection license must be paid.
For example, if you want to connect the data of Facebook campaigns, you must contract a Supermetrics license to be able to make the connection. Supermetrics is a third party connector provider, its line of business is based on creating and optimizing these connectors that are not natively available for free and delivering them to the community.
Data Studio benefits
Data Studio automates the report viewing process. As a user editor of the dashboard, you will be able to add the data sources and create the charts with the most relevant KPIs, however, when requesting data from a specific range of dates, the tool will display the information fully updated. It really streamlines the reporting process. It will probably take an hour or two to make the first report with all the data, however, after that first action, the rest will be completely automatic.
Another benefit is that more than one person can edit the report, so the creation of a report can be streamlined through teamwork. In addition to this, the report can be shared through a link, which can be saved as a favorite page in the search engine that you use daily. Important note, the data that is used will always be private. The options to share the report will allow only the people with the link or those you indicate to see or edit the report. Finally, dashboards can be scheduled to be sent automatically on a specific day and time.
Data studio in action
With all the data available and with the potential to be used to optimize marketing strategies, Data Studio then becomes the salvation to visualize such valuable information in a way that can understand what actions to take.
For one of our clients in the education industry, we were able to create a report that was built from the information from enrollment requests, all separated by all its different lines of business.
That is, we do not stay with the number of requests made on the site in a generic way, but we observe by type of education (baccalaureate, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree) This separation and automatic data classification allowed us to understand the behavior of users for each one of its lines of business. Knowing perhaps what educational level needs to be worked more in depth at the content level since it does not generate enough conversions, or transferring the budget to that modality that is receiving the largest number of registrations.
So, in this way, we and our client had the ability to better understand user behavior and the way they convert on their website, all from a friendly and easy-to-understand platform.
One of the challenges that still remains is being able to educate and evangelize companies and professionals regarding the use of dashboards. On many occasions you fall into a complex ambition of wanting to visualize everything in a single panel or graph. The idea is to be able to cluster the information so that everything is built under a useful logic and we do not fall into wanting to “make dashboards for everything”, but rather for what will generate real value in the business.
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