Add multiple comparison periods in Data Studio

Discover at one glance your performance, comparing different time periods

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

Introduction

Have you ever been into a case where you analyze your data and you need to know ‘previous’ and ‘year-over-year’ change both, at the same time? Well you know this is not a science-fiction scenario, and it happens a lot when you want to perform a complete and insightful data analysis. 🤓

Data Studio is a powerful tool that provides you with a lot of beautiful graphs to visualize your data and tell your story efficiently. But what happens when you want to compare your data performance with 2 different date periods?

Let’s think our straight-forward options when we’re using Data Studio:

1. You can decide what you want the most, because there is no way to add two comparison dates into one graph.
2. You create a whole new page — duplicate of the first one — to add your secondary comparison period.

Well, don’t get disappointed yet, because I have a solution for you, that will lead you to a beautiful and insightful visualization.

The process

For the purposes of this article, I am going to use Google Analytics data from the Demo…