Episode 229: What is Google Data Studio?
Google produces some pretty amazing free tools, especially for small business owners. In today's episode, Fiona talks about free tools that can help you and your business. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Google Analytics
Google Data Studio
Other easy to use tools
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Hello and welcome to episode 229 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today, you are listening to a quick tip episode. That's really where I share a tip tool or tactic that you can implement immediately. Before we get stuck into that, I wanna acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful lands in which I work and live and record this podcast. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. All right. Let's figure out what today's episode is all about.
So today, it's really a tip tool or tactic. And today I'm talking about a tool, a digital tool, and this is something that I've been recommending to clients for a long time. Well, not that long, actually. I think this came out before the pandemic because I was working with this guy in Italy on that. And then he got caught in Italy because of the pandemic and he was gonna come back to Australia. So I think it would be probably, I'd say 2018, 2019. I'm not sure exactly, I should have looked that up, but it's a tool that's relatively newish. And so what is this tool? The tool is Google Data Studio also just known as Data Studio quite often. So as you will well know because I have mentioned many different Google tools on this platform on this podcast.
Love them or hate them, Google produces some pretty amazing free tools, especially for small business owners. So you've got Google Analytics, you've got Google Data Studio. You've got Google Alerts, which I'm constantly talking to clients about, especially when they're trying to create big collaborations and partnerships. But Google Data Studio is something that came out not that long ago. And it allows you to combine not just Google Analytics, but I think it's up to 12 other data sources. So those data sources could be information from your YouTube channel. It could be information from another social media channel. It could be your ads that you're running on social media. It could even be files that you upload. I'm pretty sure it's like a CSV or an Excel file. And it basically can give you a whole lot of information, like a bird's eye view of everything that you're doing.
It's free. It's relatively easy to set up. I'm saying that as somebody who has a good understanding of analytics, you can also work with people to set this up. If you need someone to work with, please let me know, because we can recommend people to you. There are a million agencies out there that will do this for you as well. But one of the things that I think people love about it, and I think that looks literally really good is that it's visual. So Google Analytics is also visual and if you don't have Google Analytics turned on or you don't have the not turned on, but you haven't got the code onto your website, please go and do that. Like literally pause this and go and do it because it'll give you so much information about what is happening on your website or your shop.
So you can pull different information into sort of one dynamic place with Google Data Studio and you can see, what you actually need to see and, and then make sense of that to inform your decisions when it comes to marketing or brand decisions or business decisions, financial decisions, whatever it is. And so one of the reasons that I think people really like it is that, as I said, it is dynamic just like any other kind of analytics report that you are looking on, live on Google Analytics, but Google Data Studio allows you to see things. Anyone can see it. You can literally just send a link. I think it's a lot easier to access than say if you have somebody open up Google Analytics and they're not really sure where to look and maybe you don't have dashboards set up.
So Google Data Studio can look really pretty and it can look really plain. And sometimes what you pay for is people making it look on brand. I had this guy that I mentioned who is from Italy, was living in Australia and then went back to Italy and I think got kind of stuck during the pandemic. And so he would make them pretty cheaply for people, however, they didn’t look like the most beautiful dashboards. And I have seen a range of clients that have, from agencies that they're paying quite a bit of money to like a freelancer, who's set it up and that they can look as beautiful or as not beautiful as you want them to look. And I know that that might sound really superficial, but sometimes looking at reports can be very confronting, particularly if you're not somebody who uses analytics or who has that background at all, they could be overwhelming to look at.
So having it visually look nice is a plus with that, you can also have graphs. If you're somebody who learns, who can take in information better through kind of graphs and frameworks and visual manifestations versus lines of text, then this is you're gonna love this because you can see things mapped out as a graph or as a pie chart or as something else that may be easier for you to take in that information than just lines of, of text as per you know, some of the non-sort of dashboard analytics that you're looking at on Google Analytics. And even just that sentence. I was like, “that is gonna lose a whole lot of people that are listening to this.” So let's just go back to the main points. Google Data Studio is from Google. Also just known as Data Studio.
It allows you to combine up to 12 sources of information. So you can pull information from your Google Analytics. You can pull stuff from Shopify, you can pull stuff from YouTube, and you can pull stuff from wherever you are looking at. I think to date and I'm in 2022, I think they've got like 150 around about sources that you can pull from. So also they have a whole bunch of templates already set up. So if you are an eCommerce brand, you could just use one of their eCommerce templates and it'll suggest which data sources it should be pulling in for you once it's set up. So this is where if you're like, “You know what? I can't actually afford to have an agency I'm not at that stage,” then that's cool. You might have a freelancer who does this for you.
I can suggest a freelancer. I can also suggest somewhere in Upwork and have somebody pull this together for you. Once it's at a stage that you like it, you don't necessarily have to keep working with that person or that agency necessarily depends on what you're trying to do with your business, but because it's set up and it's dynamic. So it means that you can come in and you can change the date ranges and you can see information, where you may need help with, is if you wanna add a new data source or take one data source out, the other thing is analyzing it. So this tool is a great tool. It is a great tool, but setting it up alone is not enough. So you need to understand what those numbers mean. And quite often I'll be working with my clients on that and be like, “oh, have you noticed this?”
Or you might wanna go back to the agency and ask this or that. But one thing that Google does and they do it really well, you have to give them props for that is that they have a lot of help available. So I think you can actually go through like a Google Data Studio Course with them. And I have to point out as well. I'm actually gonna do a separate whole episode on this, which is to Google Digital Garage, which actually walks you through a lot of Google products and in relation to small business. But with Google Data Studio, there are templates. There are courses in there that they're going to go great, like the help section to give you support to set this up. Likewise, you could find somebody to help you set it up. I really do think that knowledge is power.
And if you don't know what's happening, or maybe you are across your analytics, but they're in lots of different places, your YouTube Analytics is over here. You've got maybe some insights that are being tracked in a scorecard on Excel Sheet and Google Drive. And then you've got Google Analytics and then you've got somewhere else. This just allows you to pull all that information into one spot and see what you actually need to see. What somebody else may need to see from their analytics will be different from what you need to see. And then further to that, you can visually see this stuff. So you can see it in graphs or pie charts or a range of different things. The other thing that's pretty cool is if you are somebody who has a team, or maybe you've got a bunch of contractors that work with you, you can share it with them through a link, but when you are actually sharing it, say on a screen or showing people anything you can click and move elements around of those graphs and see it, it looks really cool.
It's very interesting. It's kind of like for anyone who's in Australia, there is a guy on ABC. I cannot remember his name, but he is like the analytics guru. Whenever we had an election or all through the pandemic, he had these incredible graphs on a screen and he was able to show what was happening. Where in all states at all times, it was just amazing to see. And so you may not be at his level, but you can do some sort of moving around and looking cool on your graphs and different things that you're showing in your Google Data Studio report. The other thing is if you're an agency if you're not already using this for your clients, particularly if you're in say social media, marketing, eCommerce, SEO, it could be a great thing to be able to show them and to be able to see this is the work we're doing, look what it's actually doing for you.
But as long as you provide that information. So I think what happens is sometimes people set these reports up for their clients, and then they kind of expect that the clients are going to know what it means. So if you are somebody who's setting these up for people, make sure that you walk them through what this actually means. And another great tool for doing that can just be as simple as using QuickTime on your computer. Because you can just screen record. I know Canva also allows you to screen record now. So these are just great things to have. Zoom is another thing that you could just use to screen record so that people know how to use Google Data Studio. So I wanted to come on and just sort of share that tool with you. If you are somebody who wants to have a bit more overview of what you're actually doing, then definitely check it out.
I'd get no kickback from Google. I wish I did, but I don't. We will link to the Google page for that. And again, as I said, they've got lots of free information on how to use it. You could also find a million YouTube videos on this sort of stuff. Always look for the year that you're searching for. If you're looking at this sort of stuff, like if you're gonna put in how to use Google Data Studio put in 2022 or whatever the year is that you're looking at so that you get the most up-to-date information. I hope that helps you. If you found this useful and you wanna go back and have a look through this in text format and have links to these different places that I'm mentioning. You can find that at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast /229, this is episode 229. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
