Anybody else using Google Data Studio for business analytics?
I've long been frustrated with the crappy dashboards that basically all sales tools provide - they don't really provide any insights or ways to understand what's going on in the business and far too often, the graphs aren't even accurate.
I was complaining about this to one of the guys in my coworking space and he showed me Google Data Studio. The learning curve is a bit steep but within an afternoon I was able to build a dashboard for one of the businesses I advise!
Now that I'm getting a bit deeper into it with my two main businesses, I'm looking for resources to learn the tool a bit better since most of my lessons are a mix of youtube + experimenting. Anybody out there a few steps ahead of me have places you've found useful to learn?
I usually use power bi to analyze business data.
I use it every day to connect my clients to their own data. Since most people find it difficult to get insight out of spreadsheets, this helps me tell the story.
When I learned it, I mostly just used Googles resources as they have pretty thorough documentation.
But connecting a basic spreadsheet is an easy way to get familiar.
Not sure what your intended use is for it, but sometimes it's worth getting a connection service like power my analytics or supermetrics to connect your other platforms like stripe, Shopify, social ad platforms or Mailchimp.
If you want to get really advanced, make sure to check out the SQL capabilities too!
hey @alexhillman! - a bit late but just joined the community.
I started using GDS since its launch (2016) as my main domain is analytics.
This free BI tool helped me to upgrade the majority of my excel-reporting to nice interactive dashboards. As Head of Ecommerce in one of the top travel brands in Greece , I managed to persuade all of my directors to use this tool in order to make better decisions quickly.
Some years later, I quit my full-time job in order to focus on how to build easy-to-use marketing templates for online businesses.
Thanks to Google Data Studio, I have managed to create zero-coding products that are trusted by more than 700 companies worldwide (https://www.databloo.com/)
In case you are interested in tips, tricks, and more.. for Data Studio you can check some articles here https://www.databloo.com/data-studio-blog/ and join my monthly curated newsletter "Data Bloo Topics".
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
This is cool, congrats, and def the kind of thing I would've probably learned a lot from when i was getting started!
I think our use cases are a bit more specific and niche - your ecommerce templates look closest. In our cases, we connect to various digital sales reports across tools like Gumroad, Shopify, Podia, and Teachable to build custom dashboards that report revenue totals and sales patterns across them.
One place I still get hung up is more advanced filtering and calculating things from reports - e.g. one thing I'd love to figure out how to show are things like aggregate customer lifetime value across all platforms (e.g. how much a specific email address spends with us, as well as the mean/median/averages across all customers and other specific customer segments), customer lifespan, etc.
I'd also be into learning if it's possible to connect something like ConvertKit as a data source, since it contains a lot of structured data about our customers tucked into custom fields and tags, keyed off their email address.
Any sorts of blog posts on how you'd generate those kinds of reports would be awesome and super helpful!
Thanks for your reply!
Indeed it's quite challenging to sync data from different data sources with a BI tool without any extra costs.
Regarding Data Studio, there are two ways to connect all those data sources with your reports:
Manually -> export data from Gumroad, Podia etc. to a Google Spreadsheet and then connect this with your GDS report.
Automatically (for specific sources) -> export data from data sources using an add-on such as SyncWith to a spreadsheet. This option has some limitations in terms of the available APIs you can use. For instance you can pull your Shopify data using this SyncWith for free, but not sure for other platforms (Gumroad).
We already use the Google Spreadsheet technique, it works well (except for when our sheets get big, then it gets really slow!)
I think it's figuring out how to use the various functions and filters to calculate things like LTV, etc where I get stuck the most. I don't feel like I really understand how it works, just barely enough to make basic graphs!
hey @alexhillman! just stumbled on this post while considering the same... i'm looking into google data studio for reflection.app for better insights on churn and user behavior. did you end up using it? would love to hear about your experience
Yep, I'm using it in a couple of places. Still feel like a novice (especially when a data source changes something in the data structure unexpectedly!) and haven't really found great sources to learn from. If you do, please share!
Will do!