Top 7 reasons why Google’s Data Studio is amazing!
Data Studio is Google’s reporting solution for power users who want to go beyond the data and dashboards of Google Analytics. A free tool from Google that lets users make custom reports with data from Google’s marketing services and external sources.
Google Data Studio is a data reporting dashboard that is highly customizable, functional, and easy to use. Data Studio offers the ability to pull information from Google Analytics, AdWords, YouTube, Search Console, and countless other data sources. Similar to other applications within Google Drive, Data Studio makes collaboration with coworkers and clients nearly seamless.
- Multiple Data Sources
Data Studio allows you to pull multiple data sources into one place. Some of the data sources that you can bring into Google Data Studio are:
- Google AdWords
- Google Analytics
- SQL
- Search Console
- YouTube Analytics
- And More
Data Studio also has many 3rd party “Connectors” that are available to connect with and pull data from.
You can access your data from 800+ data sets from over 370 connectors (18 Google connectors and 352 Partner connectors). You can also use connectors built by Data Studio partners i.e., Partner connectors via the Community Connectors developer program. But community connectors may cost money to use. Overall there is massive value in being able to view multiple data sources in one place.
2. Control access to the data
Access to the data provided by a data source is handled by data credentials:
The owner’s credentials let other people view or create reports that use this data without requiring them to have their own access to the data set.
Viewer's credentials require each user of the data source (or reports built using the data source) to provide their own credentials to access the data set. If they do not have access to the data set, they won’t be able to view the data in reports or edit the data source fields.
3. Filter data by email address of the viewer
Filtering a data source by viewer email address lets you provide “row-level” security over the data. Only the records in your data containing the signed-in viewer’s email appear in the report.
4. Customizable
Data Studio gives you the ability to pull your multiple data sources into one customizable dashboard and lay them out in a visually appealing way. Some of the features of the dashboard:
- Ability to pull in multiple data sources and report on the metrics that drive your business ROI
- Ability to make custom calculations and use them to report
- Brand it by changing colors
- Easy drag and drop elements within the dashboard
- Add and edit text
- Customize data displays as bar graphs, pie charts, and more
- Customize for easily save, email, and/or print PDF’s
5. Real-time & Filtering
Any time you check in on the dashboard it will be up to date. With real-time analytics, someone on your team can do the heavy lifting, in the beginning, to set up the dashboard and only need to make little tweaks here and there to keep it reporting on what you would need. Furthermore, you can set up filtering and filter by User Type, Date, and other dimensions to see the exact data set you need to report on.
6. Free of Cost
That's correct! Google Data Studio is free. Google is doing an amazing job building tools to make all of our jobs more efficient and we should take advantage of the tools relevant to our jobs.
7. Sharing & Collaboration
Collaboration within Google Data Studio is a complete time-saver. Grant access to your team set permissions, and at any moment they can view and contribute on any dashboard. Even if you have that old school team member you can easily save and share the dashboard as a PDF by email or print it.
- Grant access and set permissions
- Edit and save in real-time
- Make a copy of your own
- Share the dashboard by email or print
Resources
- Go to Google Data Studio — https://datastudio.google.com/overview
- For more information on data connectors — https://datastudio.google.com/data
Happy Learning! :)
