In this video you're going to learn how to
create dashboards in Google Data Studio, including adding elements to your dashboard and customizing
your data. I'll also cover the benefits of using Google
Data Studio to visualize and present data from Google Analytics, as well as Google Sheets. I'm Benjamin and I'm going to help you get
the most out of your data to improve your website and online marketing. If you haven't already then please subscribe
to receive the latest tips tutorials and more. Let's get started! We'll jump into Google Data Studio in just
a moment, but I just wanted to really highlight the key benefit of using Google Data Studio
over, say the standard reports or the dashboard options inside Google Analytics - and that's
really that what we're doing is we're creating something that's very dynamic. So with the dashboarding options we can add
in things like a date range selector, so that when people are actually engaging with the
dashboard they can manipulate the data they're finding in a live scenario. So let's now have a look at a couple of dashboards,
so we're going to actually create these two dashboards today. First we're going to create this audience
overview dashboard and I'm actually going to walk-through the steps that I went through
to create this dashboard. So it has some key pieces of information - so
there are top level metrics along with trends for this particular website. We can see we've got some trending, and some
comparison, as well as some details about the pieces of content that people are engaging
with on the actual website itself. And we can also see that date range selector,
so actually making it dynamic inside Google Data Studio. So this is the first Data Studio report we
will look at creating. The second Data Studio report we'll look at
is this one. This is actually combining data from some
different Google Analytics reporting views. It's actually combining four different sets
of data to recreate a report inside Google Data Studio because this is one of the other
key benefits of Data Studio - is that we're not just looking at one piece of data we can
actually supplement additional pieces of data in, so, for example, in this case I'm actually
combining data from four different sets of Google Analytics views, but we can also do
things like add in additional pieces of data, for example, from Google AdWords or from YouTube
or anything that we can pull into Google Sheets, as well, so this is a really key benefit for
Data Studio. So let's jump in now to Data Studio and have
a look at the interface. So here what we can see is the home section
of Google Data Studio and across the top we can see there's some templates or some sample
reports you'll actually also find these down here inside the interface, so you'll actually
jump in and you'll find that this is the same in all the different Google Data Studio accounts. And also see up the top here I've created
a few dashboards myself, so these are my dashboards that I can also find inside Google Data Studio. And we can see here we can flick between ones
that I own or ones that are shared with me and on top of that we can also come down and
see the different data sources, so we'll talk about this in a moment, but basically we can
pull in some sample data. For example, from the Google Analytics demo
account, but of course we're going to be supplementing in our own data, so pulling in data from our
own Google Analytics accounts. From our own Google Sheets and so on. So from here I'm going to click on 'start
a new report' this is going to kick things off and we're starting from scratch inside
Google Data Studio. So our first step is to select a particular
data source, so we can actually use one of the sample ones. For today I'm going to use the sample Google
Analytics data from the Google Merchandise Store, but you also have the option, of course,
to come down the bottom here and actually pull in your own data set from your own Google
Analytics or Google Sheets and so on. So let's kick off I'm going to click on Google
Analytics data and I'm going to add this to my report. So now I can begin actually editing my report,
so the first report I'm going to create is the audience overview report and this is going
to be in landscape, so I just need to modify this report. So click on 'file', 'report' and 'theme settings'
and then just on the right-hand side here I can click on 'layout' and I can just change
this to portrait so it's a more classic style reporting template. So next up, I need to add my elements into
my Google Data Studio report so I can see across the top you have a range of options
- pie charts, trend lines and so on. You'll also find these on the 'insert' drop-down
as well, so it's up to you - use whatever you're more comfortable with. So for me, I'm going to start off with a scorecard
this is basically a straight metric so I can just drag and drop, and this will now add
this element into my canvas, so here we can see I have the number of sessions and this
was pulled directly from the data source I selected which was the Google Analytics sample
data. So I can now change the particular metric
I see so I'm going to click on 'sessions' which is the default and then we can see all
the different metrics that are available here, so I can pull in data from AdWords or goal
conversion data from Google Analytics, all these sorts of things. The search option is super helpful you'll
find that this helps speed up your creation of dashboards. I'm just going to click on the 'search' option
and so now I want 'users', so I come down and select 'users 'and this will update the
score card or the metric inside the canvas here. Some other things I can do - so I can just
click back and one thing that can be super helpful is having a date comparison, so we
can actually do comparisons of the metric we're seeing here, so 61 thousand odd users
in this example to the previous period. So that would be the 28 days prior to the
date range we're looking at. Or ideally this is the one we'd want to go
with is previous year so the same date range from the previous year so I can select on
this and we can see now it's going to update and we can actually see that we have that
comparison with, so year-on-year actually up 32% in terms of our user figures from Google
Analytics. I also like to add the detail back in there
just for context, so you can click on 'style' and I just like to deselect 'hide' so this
tells us straight away inside the interface we are looking at a comparison to the previous
year. So it's our first element we've added into
our dashboard and we can move that around on the grid as well. So another nice thing is we can copy and paste
so you can just do this on your keyboard or you can also go through and 'copy' and 'paste'
and this will paste that element back in, so now we can actually use this to create
additional scorecards, so in my case, in my audience overview scorecard, I want to add
in pageviews, bounce rate, and some other engagement metrics. So I can just go ahead now and actually modify
the data so I can just come back through follow the same steps to find the pieces of data
I'd like to add in to my Google Data Studio dashboard.Now that I have all the elements I want, I can
move them around. I can just drag and select the elements and
just make sure they're aligning in the way I want. And now I can go ahead and add some additional
element to my dashboard. So I'm going to add a pie chart with details
about the different channels that people are using to find my website. So now I can come in, again uploading the
sample data up, I'm going to change the dimension. In this case, to default channel groupings
and since there's a lot of data here I'm going to go back and I'm going to adjust some things
here, so I can actually come back, click on 'style' and I'm going to reduce the number
of slices down to six so the top six channel groupings. And you can also make this a donut chart,
so I can just pull that to the position and now I'm going to go ahead and add in a
bar chart, this time I'm going to use the bar chart to show the different devices people
are using, so again select where I want to put it. I can come back select my data, so I'm going
to use the device category for this one. And now I can adjust this bar chart so I can
come back in, I can say I want 'horizontal' and I can also just remove the elements and
I can just make it a little bit bigger so now I can see the different devices people
are using to find and interact with the website. So next up, I'm going to create a trendline
so I'm going to come up and I'm going to use the time series option and I can drag that
across. And now I'm going to look at users, so I'm
just going to modify this to 'users'. And I can also come back in and do a few things,
so I can actually do a comparison to the previous year right within the trendline. And I might even just make a slight cosmetic
change, I'm going to add in the points for each spot on the chart. And finally for the data I'm including in
this dashboard, I'm going to include some details about the pages people are engaging
with so I'm going to include a table. So now I can add in the details that can come
in to data for me I'm going to include our 'pages' or the page. So now I can see the different pages people
are engaging with I can come back in and I can add in additional metrics, so in this
particular case I'm going to switch 'sessions' to 'pageviews' instead. And I'm also going to add in another metric
which is 'bounce rate', an engagement metrics. So now I can see this inside the report. And the other thing to note, and you'll see
this when we jump into the live example, is you can still tab through the different results
here, so we're just looking at the top ten but you can certainly travel through and view
the other ones. Now there are some other things that we can
do with the report, so we can actually do things like this so it can actually come into
the columns and I might want some visual detail about the page using this particular instance,
so I can click on 'bar' and this is going to mean that I can see a quick bar chart and
I can also choose to include the number so now I can see not only the number of pages,
but I have this visual reference to understand the how that sort of adds up in the scheme
of all the different pages people are engaging with. The other thing that you may have already
noticed is the heatmap option, so here for example with Bounce writer can quickly highlight
pages that have a higher bounce rate, so you can use the heatmap option to quickly highlight
those particular metrics that have a higher value, in this particular case. So now I have the basics down for all the
metrics and dimensions that I want inside my dashboard, so you can see they're all here
and from here my next step is really to just clean this up in terms of the design, so I'm
going to add in a header and just some other elements to make sure that it's nice and clean
and crisp for the people I'm delivering it to, so I can go ahead and I can do this. So for example, I can add in a bit of a header
so I can just drag a rectangle in so I can add this in I can change the color and then
I might sort of move my different elements around, so just clean them up a bit. And I can also add in additional text to give
my report a heading. On top of this I can also add in a date range
tool, so this will basically make the report more interactive. It will mean that people can actually come
in and manipulate the date range they're looking at for my dashboard, so here I can actually
click on 'data' and I can select the default so I might say my default is say the last
30 days of data and click on 'apply'. So now what will happen is people can actually
come in and modify the data that's available inside this rolling report. If you want to have a look, just click on
the 'edit' toggle so this now gives us our live report so we can see our dashboard and
you can see that it is interactive you can actually tab through the different pieces
of information we've included in the dashboard, and importantly, I also have this option now
to manipulate the date range I'm looking at, so I can enter in the start and the ending
date and now the report will actually refresh for me. And I can come back in and edit the report
again, and I can come back in and continue to tweak it until I'm happy with my dashboard
report. And now I'm happy with my final dashboard
report inside Google Data Studio. Now we're going to look at how we can actually
combine different sets of data, in my example I'm going to combine different pieces of Google
Analytics data to create a report across four different websites that I've done here. So you can actually if you've got the overall
trend at the top and then coming down I can actually hover over and see the performance
broken down by the different site. So to do this I'm going to need to use Google
Sheets to actually aggregate this data together for me to combine it into Google Data Studio,
so let's jump into Google Sheets. So here in Google Sheets what we're doing
is I'm actually using the Google Analytics add-on to actually pull in data from in this
case four different websites from Google Analytics and I'm just pulling some basics details,
so I'm just pulling the session numbers across these four different sites. So what we can see here is, we're pulling
this data and I can see I've got my number of sessions and it's now going to, in the
final sheet, here, actually combined them all up. So now I've got the number of sessions for
each of my sites and then the total number of combined sessions and we're going to be
pulling this data into Google Data Studio now, so let's head back into Data Studio. Here I can create my new report, so I'll just
click on start a new report and now I need to pull in my data from my Google Sheet so
I'm going to click on 'create new data source', and you can see here all the different options
we have available for pulling data into Data Studio. Lots of Google products of course, from analytics
we've looked at through two AdWords and for me I'm going to use Google Sheets because
this gives me huge flexibility in the data that I can pull in. So from here I can see the sheets I have access
to I'm going to click on the one that I want which is 'combined data example' and I'm going
to use my combined worksheet out of that particular spreadsheet, so now I can click on 'connect'
and now I have the different details that I'm pulling in and I'm just going to click
on 'add to report'. So now, for my example, I'm just going to
keep it simple today, I'm going to create a time series with my combined data for all
those four different websites being measured into Google Analytics. And straightaway I now have that data available
right within my Data Studio report. This gives me, now, my total trend for all
four sites combined, so absolutely great way to actually combine different data into a
report using Google Data Studio. So from here I can tweak things of course,
I might want to make some slight sort of tweaks. You can also of course, add in things like
a trendline, if you choose. So I can add that in, and now what I'm going
to do is I'm going to add in this additional element around the, actually splitting it
apart. So I can actually quickly hop over and see
for that particular day you know how much traffic came from website one two three four
and so on. So now I'm going to add in a new element into
my report. So for this I'm going to use the bar chart,
and I'm just going to pull it in, so I can see here I can pull in additional metrics. I'm going to combine these up here. And so I'm just going to add them all in. Now I have my four metrics and I'm going to
stack this chart. So now I can see the makeup for each date,
and I can actually come in... And now I can see I have my data coming in
as I want. So it's a great example of actually combining
different pieces of data into Google Data Studio and you can see here Google Sheets
is a great way to pull in custom data. So that's how you can use Google Data Studio. Tell me how you're using Google Data Studio. Let me know and leave your tips in the comments
below. If you thought this video was helpful please
subscribe, share it with your friends and hit the 'like' button, so I know to make more
videos like this. See you next time.
