Over the years we’ve found that essentially all marketers & businesses desire to be data-driven. However, many find Google Analytics so daunting that their precious data ends up locked away, unloved and gathering dust. We’re here to make obtaining insights into your data heaps easier. So without any further ado – meet your Google Data Studio dashboard.

Google Data Studio is Google’s free reporting tool that allows you to build awesome dashboards and report on all of your site activity, as well as any marketing you are doing (e.g. AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn). You can combine a bunch of data sources and build all the charts and graphs your business could possibly ever need.

At Aro, we love using GDS for our clients and thought others might like in on the action. That’s why we’re giving away our Google data studio template for free for anyone to use. Our only ask is that if you’re loving it, give this a share.

To start off, we’ve put together a 4-page report, and we think is better than any other data studio template we’ve seen (happy to be proven wrong on this one if you’ve found better).

If you're ever looking for help with your Google Analytics come have a chat to Tim Dorrian SEO or the team at Aro Digital.



A lil’ taste of the data studio dashboard

Get the dashboard



We’re going to continue to improve this data studio template for other marketers and entrepreneurs, so if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see included – let us know!

Setting up your data studio dashboard

1. Prerequisites

If you want the full power of the reporting you’ll also need:



A Search Console account connected to the same Google account



Demographic data turned on in your Google Analytics account

Be tracking goals/conversions or transactions in Google Analytics



An active AdWords account with campaigns running

Let’s Get Started

2. Make a copy and add Google Analytics data

Now you’ve got all of these sorted, it’s time to connect your Analytics account to the data studio template.

Make a copy of the Template Hit the dropdown menu for the first box, click ‘Create New Data Source’ Give Data Studios access to your data (not shown in video below) Go to the Google Analytics row Pick your GA account & view Hit connect (top right) Wait a couple of seconds for ‘Using Owners Credentials’ to Disappear Then click add to report (top right)

3. Add Search Console data

It’s the exact same process as adding Google Analytics for adding Search Console – however, you’ll adding ‘Site Impression’ not ‘URL Impression’

4. Add AdWords data

You should be getting good at this by now – it’s the same process for chucking AdWords in – just make sure to select the correct AdWords account.

Using the dashboard

The report’s actually incredibly easy to use. We’ve added date, channel grouping, country and age filters along the top of the report.

Clicking these allows you to change the data of the report, allowing for a more in-depth analysis of your data.

Just to note, you may have metrics that you wish to report on that aren’t included in this template, or you’re looking for something that focuses on a different channel. If that’s the case you can hit us up directly for help.

Pro tip: For the Channel Grouping, Country or Age filters, click the “only” button to save de-selecting every option.

What’s Each Page For?

Each page exists to give you insights into an individual metric set. Below is a little video we’ve put together of the different uses of each page.

And here’s a more in-depth breakdown of the pages and questions they can help answer.

Overview

Top level understanding of the visitors and transactions on your site, and how this has changed over time.

How many people have visited my site?

How many sales did we receive?

When were the big spikes in sales?

How is my site performing in terms of site health? (e.g. avg. page load time)

What proportion of my traffic is coming from mobile?

What devices are people converting on?

Transaction Overview

Diving into transactions to break down what’s driving sales & revenue.

Traffic Sources – What channel is most traffic coming from?

Facebook Performance – What content are users highly engaged with?

Adwords Performance – What products are users purchasing due to Adwords?

Organic Visits – Are our organic visits increasing? What city are they coming from?

Keyword Rankings – What’s our CTR on Google? What’s our average position for each keyword?

AdWords Overview

Providing a more detailed breakdown of paid search campaign performance.

Traffic – How much traffic to the site is being driven by paid search campaigns?

Conversion Performance – How much sales revenue are we generating through paid search campaigns

Share of Voice – What proportion of my ads are being served in comparison to total available impressions? Where am I losing out?

Campaign Performance – What campaigns are my top performing campaigns?

Search Queries – What are the search queries that are driving the most traffic to the site?

Search Console Overview

Understanding how the site is performing in Google Search.

Overview – How many times did users see and click on our results?

Search Terms – What search terms drove visits? What was the click-through rate of those search terms?

Search Volume – How has clicks and impressions changed over time?

Demographics – Where have clicks arrived from?

Device – What device did clicks come from?

Quick note: In the template, we’ve used the Google Merchandise Store data for the Google Analytics and Search Console data, and old Google Adwords account (not optimised at all) for the Adwords data.

We hope this dashboard is helpful to some of you out there, if you’re loving it, feel free to share the love in your favourite digital marketing group!

We’re super keen to continue to improve this, so if you have any suggestions feel free to leave a comment below!