Data Studio tips to make your dashboard faster
By: Matheus Rodrigues Dos Santos
Tags: Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Data Studio, Data Visualization

Data studio is an incredible data visualization tool, making data exploration and visualization a lot easier, requiring almost no programming knowledge, but this ease of use can cause very inefficient data structures in the background, making Dashboards slower than they should be.

In this article I’ll present the two Data Studio features that impact loading times, so you can take that into consideration for your own dashboards and be aware of the alternatives. But keep in mind that even though some uses may make your report slower, that doesn’t mean you should avoid it completely.

The impact of those features on load time is highly associated with the amount of data, the more data being pulled, the larger is the impact of inefficient techniques but the opposite also applies, if you work for example with the demo account from google merchandise store, you’ll actually have a hard time making any report slow. (contact me if you can)

Data Blends

When someone asks me for help with slow reports, the first thing I check is their data blends (resources > manage blended data) and what I usually see is a lot of different blends being used and mostly with a single use.

I’ve seen Blended Data (213) as a record, what about you?

Data blends can be used to join data from different data sources into one but it’s commonly used to transform the data as presented in the picture below, enabling users to create conversion metrics and any calculation based on a single dimension(usually pages or events).

How the data is structured (left) and how it needs to be(right) to perform calculations

The problem is that this is very inefficient. Recently I replaced data blends for calculated fields and cut ⅔ of the loading time for this change alone.

Now let’s get to the alternatives, to get the same data in a more performatic way:

Goals: it’s possible to create goals on Google Analytics based on specific page views or events, this will create the same result presented on the last image without the data blend, but there are some limitations, you can only set 20 goals per view and the data is only collected from the point you set the goal forwards. I believe this is a great solution if you want to track important parts of your business but it’s not ideal for something you only use once… But if you really want it, you could create a new view for that.

GA Add-on for Google Sheets

Use Google Sheets as a intermediary: There is an Add-on for Google Sheets that pulls data from Google Analytics, enabling Data Studio users to use Google Sheets for their data preparation, easing a lot of the load on DS, the downside of this approach is that you lose some agility by having to set up the data you need on Google Sheets, before using it on the report. But you can always use the data straight from GA while you build the report and then change it to Google Sheets for better performance.

Calculated fields

Calculated dimensions and metrics can be used to create new fields based on the data you have available for example create “channel groups” based on source and medium or calculate the number of pageviews per visit and many others.

Example of a calculated dimension

This is really useful and you should use it but be aware of how it’s been used. It’s possible to create calculated fields on chart level (for each individual chart/table/etc) or create it directly on the data source. If you intend to use this field on multiple charts/reports, create it directly on the data source as it won’t have to be calculated multiple times but be careful as this will also be calculated for any other dashboard that uses the same data source, if you don’t want that, just copy the data source and edit that one instead.

To create on the chart: select chart > add dimension/metric > create field

To create on the Data Source: Resource > manage added data sources > edit > add a field

Using too many calculated fields can slow your report as well but not even close to what data blends do, as an alternative it’s possible to use Google Sheets as presented before and create the same fields without the performance impacts.

Bonus tip

If you don’t need an interactive dashboard, scheduling your reports to be delivered in pdf by email could be a good idea, for presenting or as a backup. (you can’t get better performance than a pdf)

Conclusion

This is how I solved most of my problems with Data Studio. It’s not perfect but now I won’t be annoyed while waiting for a dashboard to load. Hopefully Google can implement more efficient alternatives in the future, specially for creating conversions and other similar metrics.

Remember: don’t stop using features just because they may not be the most efficient way but keep it in mind the alternatives if you need it, loading speeds can be very important if the dashboard is exploratory and multiple filters will played with but it doesn’t matter as much in a static report that doesn’t require interactions.