How to use Google Data Studio to create your first report?

Google Data Studio is part of Google Analytics 360 Suite, which is an expensive solution for small and medium businesses. However, just like most of the other Google products, Google is offering a free edition of their reporting it as a standalone web application in the name of “Data Studio”.

How are digital marketing companies creating reports for clients?

Most digital marketing companies, including our agency “SpiderWorks Technologies”, import data from Google Analytics to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel through a manual process and create some basic reports. It is possible to create graphical reports and do some branding using this spreadsheet reporting but it is a laborious process.

With Data Studio, Google gives a free tool to make informal, presentable and dynamic reports to clients through an easy to use report building platform.

How Data Studio makes reporting easier?

Data Studio gives a drag-and-drop platform to build dynamic reports by using live data from a variety of data sources including Google Analytics, Search Console, AdWords etc. Tools like Analytics, AdWords and Search Console gives a lot of raw data, which can be exported to various other tools to generate visual reports. With the Data Studio visualisation and analysis tool, you don’t have to depend on any third party tools to generate reports from your Analytics data.

Steps to create a report using Data Studio

In this article, I am going to show how to create your first DataStudio report. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will use a very simple example and create a report using Google Search Console as the data source. Once you get familiar with how to use a data source, you will be able to figure out how to use more complex data sources and create intuitive and advanced reports.

Open Google DataStudio and Create a Report

1. I am assuming you have already signed for Google DataStudio. Login to your DataStudio account here – https://datastudio.google.com Click on the + sign on the bottom right corner of the studio to create the report.

2. Give a meaningful name for your report by clicking on the title in the top left corner. The default name is “Untitled Report”. You can edit and change it.

3. Choose a Data Source from the right bar. If you haven’t connected a data source yet, you can click on the button CREATE NEW DATA SOURCE” and connect to a data source.

4. You will see a bunch of “Connectors” on the leftbar. These are the currently supported connectors. Each connector provides a connecting bridge to a particular type of data source. The data sources can be a variety of tools including Google Sheets, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, MySql Database etc.

For this example, choose “Search Console” as the data source.

5. If you are not connected to Google Search Console account, you will be prompted to authenticate with your Google credentials. Choose the website account from the list.

6. Once you select a website, you will get 2 table sources on the next column. For the purpose of this sample report, choose “URL Impression”.

7. In the next screen, you will get the option to choose the Fields to be included in your custom report. Since we are looking for a simple report, let’s not edit any of the fields. Click on “Add To Report” button to select all these fields to the report.

8. You will be prompted for a confirmation. Just click on it to confirm and setup the data source for your first DataStudio report.

9. At this stage, we have setup the data source for your first DataStudio report. But the report is not yet created. Now, we have to choose the appropriate objects like graph, table etc to create the report using the data source we just connected.

You have an empty report now.

You will see a bunch of objects on the top navigation bar. Choose appropriate objects to add to your report.

10. Choose a “Date Range” object first, which will be used as the date range for the data in the report. Click on the “Date Range” object on the data elements in the navigation control. It is located towards the right. After you click on the “Date Range” object to select it, click on the report to place the control. Then, click on the “Default Date Range” on the right bar to choose the date range for this report.

11. Now, click on the “Pie Chart” element and place it in the report. You may optionally change the Dimension and Metric for this element.

Your first DataStudio report is ready. Click on the “VIEW” button on the top right corner to see your report in action.

Click on the “Edit” button in the top right corner of the report to go back to the editing mode. You may try placing different report elements and try changing the dimensions to see them all in action.

Hope you enjoyed creating your first DataStudio report.

If you require any professional help in developing intuitive reports for your digital marketing clients, we are here to help. SpiderWorks Technologies is one of the early adopters of DataStudio to generate professional reports for its client in India and abroad.