When it comes to marketing work, accurate and reliable reporting is paramount to your success. Being able to reference historical and incoming data in one organized place can help you develop strategies, gain deeper insights, and better visualize your data. Luckily, Google offers a free-to-use tool called Google Data Studio that helps make reporting and visualizing data easy and effective.
What Is Data Studio?
Data Studio was introduced as a beta program in 2016 and has recently become one of the best tools marketers can use to make data visualization easier. With Data Studio, you can create a dashboard to help visualize key metrics needed to review current success and make informed marketing decisions. You also get to pick from various graphs, charts, and tables that let you choose the best option for how you want to visualize your data.
Additionally, the platform gives you multiple options to choose from when picking data sources. Having multiple data sources to choose from is a great feature so that you can examine data from various places and initiatives. Data sources such as Google Analytics, Ads, Search Console, and more are all able to integrate with Data Studio to pull your data into one location.
How Do You Use Data Studio?
Using Data studio can seem a little overwhelming when you first begin. The platform gives you the power to choose which data sources you want to pull in and how you want to portray your data.
You’ll be prompted to pick your data sources when you get started. Data sources such as Google Analytics and Google Ads are ideal sources to pick from, especially if you do a lot of work with search engine optimization or search engine marketing. Once you’ve integrated your data sources, you can set up your data visualizations on the page. You’ll have options to select tables, graphs, charts, and more that all dynamically populate and organize your data. You’ll also be able to add text blocks and titles to give context to your data points.
You can place and resize your visualizations throughout the document, allowing complete control over how you want your reports to look. For example, if you’re currently managing an SEO and SEM strategy for a business, you can have one page dedicated to SEM and another to SEO in the same report. You’re able to add auction data, search terms, and conversion data to your SEM page and site health, keyword rankings, and top pages list for SEO.
Sharing Data Studio Reports
A large part of reporting, especially for marketing agencies, is sharing your reports with clients or other parties that help your decision-making process. By having an easy-to-understand report made, you can provide your clients with peace of mind by giving them reports that they can make sense of without being a marketing expert. You can easily share these reports with anyone who has access to a Gmail account. They can also be exported as PDFs to send to those who don’t have access to Gmail.
The Takeaway
The main takeaway is that reporting with Google Data Studio is an excellent option for marketers and agencies to visualize their data better and effectively communicate what’s going on with their marketing initiatives. The platform is entirely free and available to anyone with a Gmail account. It’s fully customizable and an excellent tool for anyone who wants to make reporting more accessible to complete and understand.