How Google Data Studio can benefit Small and Medium Scale Business

Businesses today must take an omnichannel approach to engage their prospects and customers to create a great user experience. This influx of data from different channels makes it difficult to manage or draw insights from the same.

Marketers and Business owners are finding it difficult to identify their campaign efficiency and key areas where they are falling to improve the same. To do this, they need to keep track various aspects of the customer experience such as – traffic source, user behavior, geography, click through rate, conversion rate, cost per conversion and a lot more. 

Apart from tracking the same, they must do a deeper analysis of the data to identify the key areas of improvement. While it is possible to extract the data from the free (or paid) version of Google Analytics into Microsoft Excel and do basic reporting on it, Google has come up with its own reporting tool, Google Data Studio that allows you to have more enriched analysis – and that too for free. 

About Data Studio

Data Studio is a visualization and analytics tool from Google. It allows you to create high-level dashboards to draw insights from multiple campaign tools and generate reports with captivating visualizations with the same. 

Data studio is free of cost and you can integrate your Google marketing tools such as Adwords, DoubleClick, Analytics, YouTube directly with it. If you have third-party tools, you may be able to use one of the many API connectors already in place. 

When Google launched Data Studio a few years ago, the free version had a restriction of 5 reports per user, while the paid version (Data Studio 360) had no such restriction. But, in 2017, Google removed that restriction on the free version, making it no different from the paid version – with this, users don’t have to pay for Google Data Studio usage. Until Google comes up with certain features and functionalities that may be available only in the paid version, users have unlimited access to all features and functionalities in the free version itself. 

Business Benefits of using Google Data studio

Monitor Campaign Efficiency

With Data studio, it gets easy to monitor your marketing channels live and find key areas to improve. 

Reduce Turnaround time

Reduce the turnaround time on reporting and analysis with the functions performed seamlessly almost over a click with Data studio. 

Map your ROMI Real-time

Return on Marketing Investment is a key thing to find your campaign’s performance against the revenue made. Map the conversions against the source channel live to improvise your plan of action.

Key Features of using Google Data studio

In-built Integration capabilities

Google Data studio allows you to connect your data from 17 Google applications and 128 third-party partners who offer direct connectors. You must ensure the Analytics property; that the tracking scripts are integrated with the website and they are working. With that, you can draw data from the integrated sources. 

You can view the complete list of direct connectors offered here

Easier set up and reporting 

Data studio has played their part extremely well with the setup scenario. Once you are clear with the kind of data you need to pull out from your dashboard, you can easily set up your visual dashboard. There are some pre-defined templates available within the application to choose from. Alternatively, if you want to create more complex reports, you can start blank and build your own dashboard too. 

Since everything around Data studio is online, it is much easier when it comes to reporting. You can create customized reports over a time period, do some analysis on it and share the generated report as a URL. This reduces the turnaround time with reporting. 

Start with Zero Cost

You cannot miss talking about the cost when it comes to Data studio. While tools from competitors may have some advanced visualization capabilities and API connectors to complex data sources, they come with high licensing costs and a need for deeper tool knowledge. For most reporting needs and commonly used data sources, Google Data Studio is on par with the competitor tools – and Google Data Studio is free while competitor tools are not.

From a cost-benefit analysis, Google Data Studio clearly beats competition. We believe most Small and Medium businesses leverage data from the commonly used data sources and can manage without complex reporting requirements, making Google Data Studio an ideal choice for Small and Medium businesses. 

Combined view of Advertising data plus Analytics data

Consolidating every piece of information about users and marketing information in one centralized location. Google data studio gives a powerful overview of marketing and sales performance on mobiles, desktop or App. Import advertising data such as impression, clicks. Cost, position, CPC, CTR etc. with website analytics data such as visits, users, bounce rate, transactions, leads etc. to measure the effectiveness of ROI.

Live Updates

The sync between the data source and the Data Studio tool is seamless that updates happen real-time. This helps you create instant reports which need no manual sync. In case of using API connected data sources, you need to set up the sync frequency.

If you are using Big data sources or Google Tag manager at the advanced level, you have the option to create live updates with “Calculated fields”. This feature allows you to create special formulas to generate customized reports. This might need some analytics skill to implement. 

Sharing and Collaboration

With organizations realizing the value for specialized talents, there would be a pool of resources working towards a specific campaign. Your SEO analyst, CPC manager, Video marketer, Social media manager, might all have their own metrics and analysis to bring on the table. 

With Data studio, you can enable them to work together on a common sheet. The feature is similar to using a Google Doc or Google spreadsheet tool. You also have the option to restrict the access such as View only, and edit etc.

If you are interested in knowing more about Google Data Studio, please contact us and we will connect you with our Analytics consultant to help you out. If you are interested in implementing the Google Data Studio for your business, you can request a quote here.