Google Data Studio Quick Tutorial - Building Reports - GDS 01

hi everyone and welcome to a brand new episode with me Danny in today's tutorial we are starting a brand new concept talking about Google Data studio and Google Data studio is not new however I haven't personally used it when it first launched and I was trying to delay using it thinking it's not important for the past two months I have been aggressively using data studio and I can't tell you how important intuitive and fun it is to work with not only that once you start using data studio you will not go back to using Google Analytics as much at least in terms of reporting because it makes reporting so much fun and so much high level that you want to share all these reports with stakeholders clients and your managers and that's exactly what data studio has been created for [Music] now there are three elements to data studio first is connection basically your data sources that's when you connect your data sources to data studio the second part is visualization and that's creating the reports in the best possible visual graphs that you can create and the third element is sharing sharing with stakeholders managers and obviously your customers let's get started with a very basic a template and we are going to start it from scratch however this a particular dashboard let's start calling them dashboards this particular dashboard is going to be to give us an idea about our users an overview of our pageviews unique pageviews sessions users and also bounce rate an exit percentage those elements are going to be on that dashboard and we all start right now so this is a fresh account I'm connecting my data studio so once I click on data studio the first thing you need to do is click on the plus sign here at the bottom it's a little bit difficult to see for the first beginner and then as I mentioned it's about three things connect visualize and share let's get started I acknowledge the terms and conditions of Google obviously you will not be able unless you read it so let's just go through it quickly and click on next now Google Analytics and Google Data studio would like some kind of arm would like me to connect my email so that I can get notifications around tips and recommendations maybe I can sign-in maybe I can sign up for this product announcements sure market research probably not this one and not offers great let's go we've done now it says please continue the preview section so now it's actually me allowing me to create my first report I click on the plus sign and there it is the first thing you need to do is to select your data source on the right hand side menu there are a bunch of data sources that I can connect to obviously the most intuitive one is Google Analytics and then you have Adwords and YouTube and this is interesting that's a new one the firebase analytics data for the sake of these tutorials for beginners that I'm starting beginners to intermediate is Google Analytics is probably fine I'm just going to say add to report okay and just giving permissions to Google data Cydia to access my Google Analytics that's perfectly fine they're owned by the same company I have no objection whatsoever ok and we are set to create our first report if you navigate to the top left hand side here you give your report a name so I'm going to say let's say users reports so it's not really just about users it's about the pageviews and the sessions and the bounce rate so what if we say website reports let's keep it very generic for now now one thing to note is in Google reports they could be created using one page or multiple pages I personally like creating multiple pages because I can access everything in a slide menu navigate menu here at the top so if I were to create more than one report on more than one page on this report then I'll click on add a page but now let's start with this clean canvas that we have now I've been experimenting with data studio as I mentioned and there are some design elements that you can create on this report directly and it makes things really simple and that's the purpose of today's video is to introduce you to some of the elements that you need to integrate on this report and also be mindful about your design the layout that you put out I'll show you some tips and tricks and believe me I've experimented a lot and I'm an expert in this so let's see what you can do the first thing you need to do for every report there needs to be a header just like any other page or web page and the way you do it is you go here into insert and you can say text or you can say rectangle rectangle is basically a design layout so I'm going to start with this as being my first I generally take around this much of height and there it is so this will be my header the next thing I need to do is to insert a title for this so I can use the text field right here notice how nice and intuitive it is I generally keep my titles on the left hand side and I'm going to call it website overview one thing to note here is this font is probably not that great so I can highlight it and then go here on the right hand side and increase my font to 32 I like 32 to be the size of the titles it stands out and because it's a dark background I generally go with a light text color so that looks pretty the other thing we can do is back to our rectangle if you don't like that color or if it does not match with your brand colors you can change it easily just by selecting it I can go here into backgrounds and borders and choose any other color now because we're creating something funky I'm going to go with purple it's a little bit darker purple bluish color so that's fine and the other thing you need to do right here which which is fun to create is you create the backgrounds of where your graphs and charts are going to be laid out that way they also stand out and they are contained in certain areas so for the sake of today's video we are creating three of them the first one will hold the page views and the unique page views the second one will hold the sessions and the users and the third will hold the bounce rate and the exit percentage so same thing I'm going to insert a rectangle and I'm going to kind of keep it a little bit with a certain margin of both sides be mindful that that size has to be multiplied by three and kind of fit the area below now I don't like this color it's a little bit too dark what we'll do is we'll choose a very light bluish color which is this one I think this creates some kind of a container without actually being too contrasting on the page itself and when you print this report it will stand out smoothly on the page one thing I like to do is create a certain border radius here and I like to choose something like ten as you can see there is a nice border radius here if I'm satisfied with this what I can do let me just expanded slightly I'll do control C on windows and control V to copy and paste and then I would just put it underneath and one more control V and I will drag it to where it needs to live I think this is this is not bad one thing I generally like to do as well in addition to creating a title is to create a one-liner underneath the header itself explaining what this particular page is about or report so what I'll do and notice how we can do it easily if I wanted to move those holes through three those three rectangles I can just select them like this scroll down and drag them - oops it didn't work out let's try it again I can select these three I can select those three and then drag them for some reason it's not working that strange it used to do it perfectly maybe I'm doing something wrong anyway let's not get too excited about this so here we go I have my one-liner right here actually it's little bit I'm going to keep it like this I like to keep the boxes at the exact same size so I'm not sure I think I messed it up slightly perfect I can reduce this despite a little bit I think now they are pretty much same that's great so I've dragged them down there and now we are ready to start our first useful graph on this page let's see what we can do so the first thing I need to do as I mentioned is to create something useful so I go on to insert if I want to and choose what type of chart I need to insert into this particular report I could choose a bar chart or a combo chart or a time series or a pie chart or a table now in my opinion for whatever reason I've been creating so many dashboards and reports in the past two months and the two the three that really stand out to me are the bar chart the time series and also the pie charts on the table oh well these are pretty much everything and probably didn't use the combo chart as much so let's get now into creating a bar chart you click on it here and you select where you want to drag it okay perfect and notice how it automatically populated something for me so that I can see something there what is the meaning of this particular chart well everything is explained in the data section right here under the bar chart properties so if I were to click on this then the properties of that rectangle would be shown here but if I were to click inside right on the chart itself then I will get the properties of a chart now charts in general have two things data and style style is basically the colors the font and the layout all these nifty kind of colorful things that make the graph stand out and the data is actually the numbers the metrics the dimensions and all the different elements that make the chart different so in our case the automatic way that Google data studio has setup is to choose the dimension being the medium so in that case in the case of the the particular chart which is the bar chart and it's going to show the dimensions right here at the the horizontal axis as you can see and then the metrics is the sessions so here we have the sessions going down in terms of of that chart now this is not what I'm interested in I'm interested in something completely different I would like to know on a monthly basis and what we do is we'll go back six months in time and attract our page views month by month that's how I want it so what I will do is I will keep that charts not going to change anything about it I'll go here to the dimensions and instead of medium I click on it notice you could choose it from here if you like and if you want to just search for something because you know what if you're looking for you can click on the search icon here and then type what you want and I want to look for month of year perfect so what it does is it shows me as you can see the month name so we're looking at May 2007 and April 2007 but I really want more than that I would like to see the past six months so if I wanted what I can do is I can go back here and scroll down just little bit okay there it is it wasn't very visible scroll down a little bit here here it says default date range auto or custom now what does that mean this is a nice concept to understand on each page you can have a high level data field or a date field that you can select the range and it will apply to all the different graphs and charts on this particular page or if you want to be specific for each chart you can select it now Auto means that it will apply to whatever is on the general page on the high-level page and we haven't really created it so we could go ahead and create it or we can use the custom custom means I want this particular chart to apply to the last six months so what I can do I like to go with April let me start from August 2016 so I can scroll back in time August and the end date I would like it to be April 2017 so that's a seven six month period there you go you can see how the graph is laid out remember this has been set to custom which means if I add more graphs here it's going to be different but if I want to apply something that's going to apply to all of my charts on this page I need to use something which is called the date range and we will talk about this later but for for the sake of simplicity this is good and now as you can tell I see here the sessions on my on my graph going down so clearly I'm not doing very well that's a very good indicator of how you're performing now another thing that I would like to add on this same on this same chart is I would like to add the number off oh hang on a second we made a mistake that particular that particular graph does not need sessions we are actually changing it to pageviews so I'll do is I'll go here to search and I'll type pageviews there you go okay it also shows me that it's kind of going down one more thing you need to do as you can tell here that the dates are messed up I don't know if you've noticed why is that let's go back and I'll explain and I'll explain to you basically if you scroll a little bit down here in the data area you would notice that the date is the sort for the pageviews is based on pageviews going descending but what we really need is the month of the year so I would select month of the year and I would say ascending because I would like to see it from August up to April 2017 okay that looks better that looks more realistic now we can see that there was a better performance more page views are viewed in November in December and then we declined slightly but we're still within regional averages for this period of the year that sounds good and I think it looks good now what if all of a sudden I decided this is not the right chart for me I want to change something else I want to go with a time series one that all I have to do is while I'm selecting this I click on time series and notice what happens there you go it automatically changes the chart without requiring me to change any of the settings that I have done in the past that's a nice one and what's in particular to this the time series chart and what I like the most is when you go to Styles there is an option here as you go down slightly on to show the access title if I do this it will add a title here showing that these are pageviews and also there is more settings here that I like you can do the same thing for the axis title so now it's showing month of the year let me go up slightly this is my favorite if you click on show points it will put points right here for me and I can even click on show data labels and it will actually show me the numbers right here this looks pretty not only pretty but useful so we'll stick to this particular graph now going back to data my chart is not really complete what I want to add as well is the unique pageviews and I can do it simply by scrolling down here to the data and right underneath the metrics add a new one so I'm adding a new metric I'm searching for it as unique pageviews alright going back notice how I'll do the same thing I'll scroll up go to styles and now I have series two in addition to series one that we've done so I can scroll down and do the same thing show points show data labels now in certain cases if you don't have a lot of space this could be a little bit tricky and you have to kind of maybe move it up a little bit and make more room so that you can actually be able to see both numbers and nicely again it depends on your frame and also it depends on your your time period that you're looking at so this looks pretty and then what if you decide to go with different colors what if you want to choose a different color for this line this is pretty simple for the red I can click here and choose something else let's say I choose green and going back up here for the series one which is the page views I can click here and choose something more reddish okay I think this looks good what else can we do here we can use a different line a line width so I can make the green slightly more prominence the stroke size could be a little bit more prominent so that looks good as well this is it for this particular graph now there are other things I would like to go on and complete this dashboard and what I will do is I will end today's episode I don't want it to stretch too long in our next episode we'll continue building this this very nice dashboard and also what we will do is we will finalize it and learn new tricks and tips in building this great report until a new episode don't forget sign up for a free account with weblog I would send you templates like this that you can just copy and paste into your business and get going from there if you don't want to spend time creating these charts until a new episode with me Danny take care you

Channel: Weboq

Views: 21,783

Keywords: google data studio for beginners, start using google data studio, google datastudio, google DS, google reports

Id: mdUk62Olp1w

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Eforth]

very good!