Create a Dashboard with Google Data Studio and make automatic reports with it
By: Luigi Bungaro
Tags: Automation, Analytics, Google Data Studio, Report, Data Visualization

Google Data studio is a free interactive Dashboard that helps you to create your report. Here it is an example of a report I just created.

I have connected the Dashboard to 2 data sources:

Google Analytics (taking data from a customer website) Youtube Channel

To use Google Data Studio you just need a gmail account and after accepting the terms conditions you can quickly start to use it.

It is very easy to create a new report, you can create your own personalised Report just clicking on “Blank Report”, or you can use a template ready to use (you can also create your own personalised one after having a look to some templates to get some useful idea on how to structure your own dashboard).

Create your Blank Report or use a template

After you click on the Blank Report, you will land in this page where you can give a name to your dashboard (top left) and also connect to your data through “Create new data source” (bottom right). In case you do not have a data source to use or you just want to give it a try, you can use sample dataset that Google is providing.

Your Blank Report — Connect to the Data Source

Google has already easy connectors to your data, so you should find easily what you’re looking for. Here it is an example of data sources connectors available:

Examples of some connectors

Once you’re connected with the dataset you can start to add the graphs in the Report. Keep in mind that you can have the same dashboard connected with multiple data sources (once you add a new graph, you can connect it with the specific data source you want to use for the specific graph) , so you don’t need to create multiple dashboards for multiple data sources.

To add elements in the report, it is really intuitive. Just click on the graph that you want to add and place it where you want in the dashboard and you can change also its size, making it bigger, for example. It is possible also to add text, Images, and figures/lines.

Adding graphs

Every graph can be personalised in the right part of the report, where it is possible to choose which source of data it is related to, which metric to use and also to personalise its Style.

Choose metrics and style for your graph

A nice feature we can use is the Data Range. If we add this to the Report, it will be possible to change the data range we want to consider for the analysis, and it will change automatically all the graphs based on this time range, so we do not need to create all the graphs again and again for different time intervals.

We can use also Scorecards, that are useful to visualise some specific KPI, that do not need a graph, as the example below.

Scorecard

Once we have finished with the graph, we can share it with others in multiple ways:

Share the Report

In order, we can:

Download it as pdf Create an automatic mail to send the report (you can choose the time frequency) Get a sharable link Have the embedded code to put the graph, for example in some web pages

Hope you’ve found this article useful and enjoy your Data Analysis/Reporting!

And if you would like to support me to write other articles like this, buy me a coffee :)