Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Google Data Studio: a Nifty, Free, Easy-to-use Data Vis Tool

As a digital marketer, you can often be overwhelmed with the amount of information and data needed to be analyzed in order to evaluate your efforts. Traffic, conversion rate, user location, behavior and acquisitions --- just to name a few --- all have to be examined to define the progress of your digital marketing campaign.

Client reporting is one of the biggest challenges digital marketers face when undertaking projects. Although endless numbers and stats may make some sense to internet professionals, generally customers are not as tech savvy.

Anyone can export masses of information from Google Analytics to an excel spreadsheet, but how do you present the data in a way that's easy to digest? The answer is --- Data Visualization.

What is Data Visualization?

Data Visualization is a way of representing complex data and stats in a pleasing, visually-appealing way. Visual data may include components like pie and graph charts, maps or tables, and can be presented in different forms, such as infographics, videos, illustrations and interactive reports.

Why is it important? The answer is simple. Our brains absorb visual information better, faster, more easily.

Benefits of Data Visualization

The benefits of visualizing data include:

  • providing clearer information for clients
  • making it easier to view and analyze patterns and trends
  • enabling interaction with the data
  • allowing for more information to be absorbed, and more quickly
  • better identify peaks and troughs.

In this post, we're going to assess how a new tool, Google Data Studio, can help us build beautiful and interactive reports.

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio (GDS) is a new tool by Google that makes it easy to create beautiful, engaging, responsive, branded and interactive reports. It does this by pulling metrics from Google's properties, such as Google Analytics, Adwords and YouTube Analytics, as well as spreadsheets and SQL databases.

For this article, we’ll be using Data Studio to create a visual report using Google Analytics data. To do this, you first need to have an active Google Analytics property that is properly integrated with the website.

The same applies to other reports. If you wish to pull the data from your Adwords or YouTube Analytics, make sure to sign in with an appropriate Google account that has that data.

Getting started

The following 18 steps will walk you through the process of creating a visual report from your Google Analytics data.

Step 1

Go to Google Data Studio and log in with your Google Analytics credentials:

Step 1

Continue reading %Google Data Studio: a Nifty, Free, Easy-to-use Data Vis Tool%


by Dmytro Spilka via SitePoint

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