Create a beautiful data dashboard with Google Data Studio

Have you ever thought when using Google Analytics it would be great to be able to summarise the vast amount of information available into an easy to read, well designed report for your team or clients?

Do you have other channels such as mailing lists or contact form enquiries to be included in your report? Perhaps you want to design a report to track and measure the success of your Adwords campaigns or YouTube channel?

If you’re a small business owner and want to gain insight into the progress of your business with the help of a dashboard –  that’s where Google Data Studio comes into play. All the key data you need to display can be easily designed into a report bespoke to your business requirements. 

New features

A few months ago, after doing some research into marketing dashboards I came across Google Data Studio and was interested to find out what it could do. it was easy enough to set up an initial audience overview report and I also found that most elements could be customised and linked to a variety of data sources  – including any data exported into Google Sheets.

My only concern was how to integrate data from key marketing software, from companies such as Moz or Mailchimp for example. Would I have to find a way of extracting the data into Google Sheets for use in Google Data Studio reports? As of writing – since September 2017 some really helpful new features have become available. The Google connectors gallery now allows for developers and businesses to publish connectors to Data Studio, so over time, access to a variety of data sources directly from within Data Studio should become easier. Read more on the community connectors developer launch here.

One key feature I felt lacking before was to be able to embed reports on web pages rather than only being able to share reports via a sharing link. Now you can embed reports with iframe maintaining the same level of interactivity – (try hovering the mouse over the sample report below)

Ultimately I would summarise Google Data Studio as an essential  tool for marketers, saving businesses lots of time in the interpretation of a wide range of data streams. By creating a dynamic, live visual data report, you can display the metrics that matter to you, presenting a clear and concise performance overview of your business activity .