How to Use Google Data Studio for Performance Marketing Reporting
The use of data and analytics in marketing is a necessity for businesses seeking better campaign performance and informed strategic decisions. This data-driven approach to marketing allows for targeted campaigns, increased ROI and business growth.
Data Studio is a tool that helps marketers create easy-to-read reports for team members and clients. This free reporting tool makes it simple to get a bird’s eye view of your marketing performance.
How to Use Google Data Studio
Data Studio is a free reporting and data visualization tool that connects to your Google Analytics account and other Google products (including Google Ads) as well as third-party platforms. It allows you to create fully customizable reports with charts, graphs and tables that update in real time.
Marketing dashboards help marketers track and monitor their marketing efforts so they can make data-driven decisions about their marketing strategy and campaigns. These dashboards can display a variety of marketing metrics, including website traffic and social media followers.
Charts and graphs are effective ways to display marketing data, but they can also be overwhelming for users if used too often. For this reason, it's important to use a mix of types of data visualizations when creating your marketing dashboard. A comprehensive SEO dashboard will help you understand your website's organic performance, monitor traffic sources and stay on top of your backlinks. This one-page Google Data Studio report template combines four different marketing dashboards into a single page for easy viewing and analysis.
Getting Started
Google Data Studio is designed to make creating and sharing reports a simple process. It has many templates that can be used until you become familiar with the platform. It also offers online training videos and support services to help you get started.
The tool allows you to create a report from any number of data sources and combine them all into one report. This can be useful when analyzing multiple platforms like advertising channels for marketing purposes. For example, you can use Google types of media buying Data Studio to easily generate a keyword performance report that includes trends across different search engine platforms.
Another helpful feature is the ability to compare data from different time periods within a single chart or element. This can be helpful when analyzing performance metrics that change over time, such as comparing the results of a campaign to the same period last year. This can be an effective way to highlight significant changes in performance.
Creating a Report
If you’re a beginner, Google Data Studio offers ready-made templates to help you get started. These are grouped by the data integrations you want to use and can include everything from dashboards, tables, and charts to more visual data representations like maps and treemaps.
You can also create a custom theme for your report, adding colors and fonts based on your brand guidelines. This makes it easy for you to present data to your team and clients with a consistent look.
Another great feature of Data Studio is that you can schedule a report to be sent to yourself or others at a certain time. This is a great way to ensure everyone receives the latest version of your report, without having to manually update it.
Sharing a Report
Using the Share menu you can share a link to your report with anyone you want. You can also add editors to a report and manage access by clicking the “manage access” button.
It’s a great idea to set up scheduled delivery of your reports by email. This will automate the process and also ensure that your team gets a PDF version of the report (Data Studio doesn’t always show well on mobile).
If you choose to give people edit rights, you’ll have to decide how much freedom you want them to have. For example, if someone is less familiar with Data Studio, they could accidentally change a comparison range or filter without you knowing. This is why it’s good to limit the level of edits you allow. You can do this by adding a system or custom segment. This will apply to all pages of the report and cannot be changed later. This is especially important if you are sharing a live report.