Online marketers are being bombarded with massive volumes of data and are struggling to make sense of it all. To make smarter decisions, they require cutting-edge solutions that provide valuable insights and reports.
Google Ads and Google Analytics both have enough data to keep one busy for days and makes it difficult to share simple reports with management. Google Data Studio is a data visualisation tool that enables one to turn raw data into detailed and digestible reports. It pulls information from data collection platforms and centralises it in a single dashboard.
Bluegrass Digital CEO Nick Durrant points to Google Data Studio as the perfect solution. “It’s an easy-to-use free reporting and data visualisation tool that can help explain complex pieces of data. It can help marketing teams save time and money by creating and sharing reports in a matter of minutes.”
“The usability and versatility of Google Data Studio helps marketers make faster decisions and achieve better results. It pulls data from up to 12 different sources, including Google Analytics and Google Ads, and combines them into a shareable, easy modifiable and easy-to-read report,” he explains.
Digital marketing and advertising data can become overwhelming useful and fast to access with the Google Data Studio platform, it offers widgets, charts, graphs and maps to visualise one’s data. Google Data Studio has plenty of features and is compatible with several data sources including third-party services like Twitter, Facebook, MailChimp, Salesforce, and MySQL.
“By consolidating all this information in one dashboard, you’ll be able to gain valuable insights into your operations, finances, and marketing campaigns. Google Data Studio is fully customisable, it allows you design reports from scratch or use pre-packaged templates. You can then drag and drop widgets, graphs, charts and data onto your dashboard,” he adds.
More importantly, Google Data Studio offers interactive real-time reports, the reports are dynamic. This means when one adds information to a data source, it automatically updates the reports. One can also filter reports based on date, time or any other parameters to get the metrics one needs.
Google Data Studio is as easy as using Google Docs, it offers seamless collaboration. To share reports, one merely needs to send a link and give co-workers permission to comment and edit the report. It is also cloud-based so users can access reports from any device anywhere, anytime.
Durrant says the best of all is it’s free. “It’s a no-brainer, Google Data Studio and all its robust reporting features come at no cost. It is a total game-changer, we use it to create live, interactive reports for our clients. Google Data Studio is constantly getting feature updates and support from Google, it will help turn reporting from being a lengthy, tedious task to a quick and easy one.”
Visit the next page to read about the latest updates to the platform.
The updates to the platform include:
Filtering by the signed-in user’s email address
Users can now filter a data source to show the records containing the current signed-in viewer’s email address. This provides “row-level security” to the data.
Improved support for multiple accounts
A new account switcher lets users select one of their other signed-in accounts, should they try to access a Data Studio asset created by or shared with an account other than their primary account.
Support for Hotel campaigns in Google Ads
Users can now see their Hotel ads campaign data in Data Studio reports. This data automatically appears in Ads-connected reports. There is no need to refresh the data source.
Additional fields in Ads data
Google Ads data sources now include App, Local, and Smart campaign data. Use the Advertising channel type field to see the campaign type. This data is automatically available in new data sources. To add these to existing data sources, refresh the data source fields.
Return NULL from CASE
CASE statements can now return the NULL literal from THEN and ELSE clauses.
Additional data freshness options for SQL and Cloud connectors
Users can now refresh the data every hour, every 4 hours, or every 12 hours for data sources based on the following connectors:
- Cloud SQL
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Cloud Spanner
- Cloud Storage
To find out more about Google Data Studio, click here.