Visualize Your Data with Google Data Studio | by Tal Peretz | Towards Data Science

While striving to create a simple, interactive and accessible Dashboard out of my precious data, I bumped into Data Studio and fell in love.
When creating a new data source you can use Data Studio connectors or explore community connectors such as data.world, facebook ads, salesforce and more.
You can construct
time series chart
bar chart
combo chart
pie chart
table
geo chart
score card
scatter
bullet chart
area chart
pivot table
Now let’s learn some tips & tricks
We are going to build a cool dashboard and show some hidden capabilities of Data Studio.
We will use Facebook Metrics dataset from data.world, feel free to explore it yourself.Every principle is applicable to any other connector and specifically for BigQuery which is a common data source.
Your customers are the group of people who are going to use the Dashboard, whether those are managers, R&D teams or other companies you should meet with them, understand how your data can benefit them and define Metrics.
Let’s say Facebook’s R&D is releasing a new feature to facebook pages. The team is interested in posts interactions and specifically in the difference between paid and unpaid pages.
I like to start with the end in mind, so before we build a dashboard we should define our metrics and KPIs we want to visualize.
We set together and defined that these are the metrics we want to follow during the period of releasing the new paid feature.
Interactions Over TimeLikes DistributionPost Type by Group (paid vs unpaid)Seasonality of Interactions (weekly and yearly)
Interactions Over Time
Likes Distribution
Post Type by Group (paid vs unpaid)
Seasonality of Interactions (weekly and yearly)
After setting metrics, we will usually need to transform our data before visualizing it — probably tablify (coerce a relational schema), denormalize and create custom views.
Our data is already collected and preprocessed, the only thing we are left with is adding an id column using data.world special columns.
SELECT row_index, dataset_facebook.*FROM dataset_facebook
I recommend to use your company colors as the dashboard theme, this is the time to set your primary and secondary colors, your chart pallet and fonts.You can use your UX designer to help you get the company pallet colors and with the dashboard final structure.
It’s a good idea to add your logo as an image, add a page title and to think about the general structure of each page.
Sometime you don’t want to show all of your data, wether you want to filter nulls or certain values based on multiple conditions, you can simply create a filter.
We can create a date based filter or a data based filter.Since we don’t have a datetime column, let’s use the month column to filter posts.
Let’s create a custom data.world query with binning of posts likes
You could do the same using BigQuery, here is an official tutorial.
Building a histogram requires binning and count of rows.Binning could be achieved by creating a custom field or by a custom query as we learned above.
Binning could be achieved by creating a custom field or by a custom query as we learned above.
After we got an index column and a binning column all is left is to set the dimension to the binning column and the metric to count of index column.
I recommend to add text to explicitly state the histogram’s dimension.
Pie charts are a good way of showing how categories adds up to a whole.
When building a pie chart in google data studio you can control the ring’s width, colors and legend location to create a concise design.
Horizontal charts are my favorite way of comparing between categories. To create a horizontal bar chart:
Create a bar chartSet dimension and metricStyle →HorizontalTick show data labels
Create a bar chart
Set dimension and metric
Style →Horizontal
Tick show data labels
Stacked bar charts are a great way to compare categories between different groups i.e paid pages vs. unpaid pages:
Create a Horizontal bar chartAdd another dimensionTick Stacked BarsOptional: 100% Stacking
Create a Horizontal bar chart
Add another dimension
Tick Stacked Bars
Optional: 100% Stacking
There is no support for cross data sources operations, such as joins.[Edit: as of July 2018 There is an option to join or “blend” data sources]
Limited connectors which are mostly suitable for Google Cloud Platform users. For more connectors and flexibility check out Plot.ly and Tableau.
When starting out with Google Data Studio you expect the simplicity to be accompanied by limited functionality.
I hope I showed there is a lot of room to maneuver, and in terms of Value per Price I think Data Studio is a great choice.
Take a simple csv file or use data.world connector for existing dataset and try out Google Data Studio.
It’s Free, Simple and Shareable.
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