6 Reasons you should move to Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a data visualization product of Google. Just like any other Google product, the user interface is clean and easy to grasp making it simple for beginners to build reports. Now if you are already using multiple Google products such as Google Analytics, Google Ad words, YouTube Analytics and even Google Sheets, Google Data Studio may be the perfect solution for you. You can directly connect to existing Google data and analyze it whilst sharing it seamlessly across other team members.

Pricing

Google Data Studio has turned the BI tool game around with its free platform. You no longer need to invest hundreds of dollars to buy licenses to tools to generate consumable reports.

Like most free tools, there are some restrictions. Currently, Google Data Studio is not available across all countries. Google is slowly working to roll it out in phases.

Recently, the limit of 5 free reports per account was extended to unlimited reports. Hurray!

Create Stunning Dashboards

Stunning is right! Google Data Studio can make your traditional Excel reports look like this:

Say goodbye to graphic designers! Google Data Studio has an extremely clean, appealing and intuitive interface. You can directly connect to Google Analytics with their existing templates and generate beautiful dashboards with deep insights within minutes.

The tool gives the users the flexibility to change color palettes, gradients and fonts. You can customize pretty much anything else to format the look and feel of your dashboard.

You can pick from an array of visualization objects that suit your data including Bar Graphs, Pie Charts, Scatter Plots and other basic charts. You can also insert Text Boxes and images across your dashboard.

With all these features and more, in minutes, your dashboards can end up looking like this:

Data Connectors

Google Data Studio can pull data from multiple sources into the same report. It holds a vast library of data connectors:

Real-Time Updates

Google Data Studio reports are dynamic. It connects live to your data sources and a change in the data is immediately reflected in your dashboards. This is a feature adopted from Google Docs wherein you can observe instantaneous changes.

Sharing

Google Data Studio functions like any document on your Google Drive. You can allow access to anyone, simply by entering their email address to share it with them. Edit access allows a collaborative effort for team members to update the dashboards.

You can share reports with users who don’t have access to the Google Analytics account being used. You can also monitor who makes changes and when they do it.

Benefits over Google Analytics

Google Analytics consumes hours to export, filter and format data according to your needs. A couple of perks of using Google Data Studio for your Google Analytics data are:

• GA prevents you from combining data from multiple views or properties in the same report. This can be overcome in Google Data Studio.
• Calculated measures can be used in GDS to clean up your GA campaign parameters or even create custom channel groups.
• GA restricts you with a cap on a maximum of 12 widgets in a view. In GDS, you can use as many charts and tables as you desire.
• GA sharing and access restrictions can get frustrating. With GDS you can allow users to view your dashboards representing GA data without giving them access to GA
• The GA API limits you to 7 dimensions and 10 metrics in a single API request. Since GDS doesn’t use this API, feel free to use as many dimensions and metrics as you need.

Don’t wait any longer, move over to Google Data Studio and explore it’s benefits yourself! Log into datastudio.google.com and build your first report!

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