Google Data Studio — A Practical Guide
Imagine that we have a huge spreadsheet with 138 columns, 2546 lines and need the be clear to our boss what is the information behind the data. Is not easy to show him, right?
Put order, create graphs, filters and draw cells can help a little in this mission, but I think we’ll not be successful when showing a lot of tabs, lines, texts and many numbers.
If you need to answer a simple question how, what is the sum of sales of the month? Then a simple formula can answer the question. But, and if the people that will analyze the data have more questions? For example:
- What are the best-selling products?
- What is the average value of these products?
- In which region product X was best sold?
How I said in the first phrase at the beginning of this guide, our brain process much more fast images than text. So, the best and smart alternative is to use graphical tools to analyze data with more precision and answer the questions.
To make easier this task, in 2018, Google released the Google Data Studio, it already was part of the data analysis tools of the Marketing Platform. At this time, would be possible to create visualizations to external data and not only to data related to the Google family.
The tool is composed basically of two modules:
- Data Source
- Report
There is another tool called Explorator, but to our guide, it will be not necessary.
Let’s get the hands dirty
We’ll develop some visualizations in a dataset to show how to use the tool.
To our guide, we’ll use a public dataset from Kaggle with data about alcohol consumed in each country.
The data was imported to a google spreadsheet to make easer our job. Make it you too with your dataset.
Questions
Every good data visualization needs to answer one or more questions, then we’ll make some questions to guide us and help the put a direction for what we’ll construct.
These are the questions:
- Which countries consume more drinks in the world?
- Which consumes more in each continent?
- Which continent consume more?
- Wich continent consumes more, by drink type?
- Wich would be a world vision about de consumption of alcohol by countries?
Let’s start to build our visualizations.
1- Setting the data source
The first step will be the creation of a data source. After access the Google Data Studio, using your Google account, make a new data source:
2- Choosing the data source
Give it a name:
Choose the spreadsheet, the worksheet and click ”Connect”:
3- Setting the fields
Verify to each column of the table if the type is correct and also the group. Correct if necessary:
4- Creating the report
Click “Create a new report”:
Add the data to report:
5- First graph
The first graph that Data Studio makes is the table. It will be our first visualization:
6- Setting the table
Let’s include new fields in the dimensions (Continent) and add the metrical fields, which are the numbers in the table. The last step will be to exclude the field “Record Count” that come filled automatically:
To finish a table we’ll change the order to use the field “Liters of Alcohol”:
Change your table to take up the entire page, but let a little space in the top to some information that we will put in the next step:
7- Add summarizers
To have a vision of the total of each field, let’s add summarizers at the top of the page.
Click “Insert”, “Scorecard”:
Change the field to “Liters of Alcohol”:
Repeat the step to the field “Beer”, “Wine” and “Spirit”.
The top of the page should look like this:
We have now the table with the countries, the consumption of drinks and the total of each drink, besides the general total.
8- Adding the controls
Now we’ll possibility to choose the information easily.
Click “Add a control” and choose “Drop-down list”. We’ll see that the Data Studio already selects the field “Country” and it is the field that we want to add how the first filter.
Do the same to field “Continent”.
9- Showing
Let’s check the final result of our job.
Click “View” to interact with the table.
Take a look that the data are showed according to the controls.
10- Inserting a new page
To answer other questions let’s create a new page:
Click “Edit” to back to edition mode and “Add new page”:
11- Adding bars graph
Let´s answer the question: Which continent consume more alcohol in the world?
Then add a bars graph:
Set the graph parameters:
12- Changing the style
We answered the first question, but we can give more information yet, for example, to know how many servings of each drink this consumption represents. So, change the style of graph to “Stacked bar chart” and adjust the graph properties:
Here is the final result:
13- Maps
Let’s add the last graph to give us a world perspective about the consumption of alcohol. Repeat the last step and choose a “Geo Chart”:
Set the parameters:
15- Showing the final result
Click “Visualize” and see the result. The first page has the complete data, and the second has the graphs that help us to tell the story of the data.
This is just a fast presentation about the basic features of the Google Data Studio. Even though a free tool, it offers good resources, which makes him a good option between basic tools such as Excel or Google Spreadsheet, and powerful paid tools such as Tableau and Power BI.
Now that you already can make basic visualizations, also start to explore other features to help you in the daily job, allow you to inspect and visualize data more quickly and help you in your decisions.
Let’s take work!
Below is the link to the spreadsheet used in this tutorial and the visualization in Google Data Studio.
