Top 10 Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Google Data Studio

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Jack Taylor, Head of Data and Optimisation at FindAUniversity is our data guru and an encyclopaedia of knowledge when it comes to stats and dashboards. Here he shares his top tips on how to get the most out of Data Studio, based on some of the most common questions asked by clients.

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With Google Data Studio, it is super easy to customise the design of your dashboard and to white label with your brand theme. You can use a tool like Eye Dropper for Google Chrome to pick the exact colours from your website and apply them to shapes, tables, charts or even maps.

If you have a company logo that uses all of your brand colours, you can head over to the ‘Theme and layout’ button on the control ribbon and within the ‘Theme’ tab, you’ll see an ‘Extract theme from image’ button. This will automatically extract all of your brand colours from the logo and apply them across the dashboard.

Google Data Studio has lots of useful functions, but one of the most powerful has to be CASE.

The CASE function allows you to return a custom result when certain conditions are met. For example, let’s say our website visitor data includes the country and continent of each user. However, we would like to analyse our users by sub-continent markets. CASE to the rescue!

Here is an example for segmenting Europe:

CASE

WHEN Country IN (“Belgium”, “France”, “Germany”, “Greece”, “Italy”, “Luxembourg”, “Netherlands”, “Portugal”, “Spain”, “United Kingdom”) THEN “Western Europe” WHEN Country IN (“Denmark”, “Norway”, “Sweden”) THEN “Scandinavia” ELSE “Eastern Europe”

END

In this case we can group individual products into categories and then catch everything else with the ELSE condition.

With Community Visualisations, Google Data Studio opens up a world of user submitted components to display our data just how we’d like to and really make it pop!

One of our favourites is the Vega/Vega-Lite visualisation by Jerry Chen. While it isn’t clear from the name, Vega is a fantastic word-cloud generator.

When using charts, tables, graphs or filters, the right-click options can be your best friend. There are several great tools hiding in the right-click option, and one of our favourites is ‘Make Report-level’.

This option, when applied to a component, will duplicate that component in the same position, shape and size on every page. Edit the element on one page and the changes appear across all pages. Hurrah! If you decide that you no longer want the component to report-level, you can use the same option to toggle it back to page-level.

Bowing to public demand, Google has given us a publishing option within the File menu. From here, you can toggle on report publishing and control when you push any changes to your dashboard out to the users. You can even name iterations of your dashboard and revert back to previous versions.

You may have noticed the ‘Embed URL’ button within the control ribbon, but did you know that you can use this to embed Data Studio reports within one another?

Let’s say the Undergraduate, Postgraduate and International teams all have their own dashboards, pages from each of which we’d like to include in a round-up report. With the Embed URL tool, we can take the URL of the appropriate page in each team dashboard and embed that page in our report. Unlike just copy and pasting a screen-grab, the embedded page will be fully functional. It really is a report within a report!

Before you give this a try, you’ll first need to head over to the File menu in the report you’d like to embed, scroll down the ‘Embed report’ setting and tick the ‘Enable embedding’ option.

Don’t be scared of regular expressions, REGEXP is your friend!

Regular expressions can be intimidating, but with REGEXP cheats we can make Google Data Studio a whole lot easier.

For example, let’s say we’re importing our Google Analytics data and want to drop all of our pages into a table. By default, the page in Google Analytics will include the full URL including domain, which can look messy and distract the users from the information that matters.

With REGEXP we can easily snip out the domain name. In the example below, we’re using the REGEXP_REPLACE function to find the domain name within the Page field and replace it with a blank space.

Under the ‘Dimension’ option of the table, we can select ‘Add dimension’, ‘Create Field’ and enter the following:

REGEXP_REPLACE(Page, "https://www.findamasters.com","")

Hey presto!

/advice/blog/

/masters-degree/business-and-management/

/events/virtual-fairs/

One of the more powerful but often overlooked tools in the Google Data Studio arsenal are Parameters. Parameters allow us to dynamically change the data in our reports, based on how users interact with the report or by what is in the report URL.

Let’s imagine that we’re looking at our Google Analytics data. We would like to have a chart which shows us the number of users over time, or the bounce rate over time. Traditionally we would have to use two separate charts as we can’t match a numerical and percentage axis to the same chart.

By using parameters, we can create a dropdown picker which dynamically switches the source data for the chart from users to bounce rate, depending on what value is picked.

First, we would create a new parameter in our data source, in this case listing the values which we like to pick from.

Next, we would create a new metric to use in our chart, using the CASE function (as talked about earlier) to tell Data Studio which metric should be used when each parameter value is picked.

And that’s it! Now we can add our new metric to our chart, then use our parameter as a dropdown toggle. When a user picks a value in the dropdown, the chart will automatically switch.

There are a few really useful tools hiding away under the Layout tab of the ‘Theme and layout’ menu. To make dashboards flow and allow users to focus on the report details, a couple of options we love are setting ‘Header visibility’ to ‘Auto Hide’ and ‘Display mode’ to ‘Fit to width’. These two options will remove the annoying Google Data Studio header (with the share and edit buttons) and will resize the report to the correct proportions, regardless of the screen size of the user.

Another cool navigation feature sits within the ‘Report pages’ menu. From here we can rename and reorder the pages of our report. We can also add pages, dividers, headers and even sections to our menu.

It can be a frustrating experience when we have too much data and too little space to display it. By using nested dimensions, we can display a single data point to users, while at the same time giving them the option to drill down for more detail.

For example, let’s say that we have two dimensions: product and category, where each of our products sits within a parent category. By first dropping category into our table as the primary dimension and the product as a second dimension, we then just need to hit the ‘Drill down’ toggle. This will now only display the list of categories when a user opens the report, while giving them the option to right-click and drill-down to view all products within the selected category.

If you would like help with extending the reach of your content and campaigns to our global FindAMasters and FindAPhD audience, please get in touch with your Account Manager, email [email protected] or call +44 (0)114 268 4940.

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