If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know all about our love for Google Data Studio – the free reporting tool from the good folk at Google. If you wish to familiarise yourself with the platform before reading on, check out our earlier blogs where we give our honest review and discuss multiple data source reporting.
With the power of Google Data Studio at your fingertips, getting granular with data has never been easier. Here are just a couple of ways in which you can segment your customer data.
Chart Filtering
Firstly, the ability to filter entire report pages at the click of a button. Select any section on a chart or table and watch the page transform. Our inner geeks rejoice as this can make reports far more powerful.
We’ve mocked up a shiny example just for you!
Before: Behold, a pretty standard set of charts…
All well and good, but what if you wanted to know the device and age breakdown for just women? Time to squeeze two additional charts onto the page, right?
Wrong! By adding the ability to filter using the chart, you can simply select the subset you want to see and the other charts will change to display the new data.
To do this, first select the chart you would like to add the filter to, then in your right hand ‘Edit Data’ menu, scroll down and select ‘Apply Filter’ under Interactions.
After: Segmented data!
Page Segment Filters
Another option is to apply a segment filter to the page. Handy when the segment you want to filter by doesn’t feature on the page already. Much like the report below which displays various metrics.
Let’s say you wanted to segment this data by source channel. You can’t use chart filtering as this segment doesn’t feature anywhere. Add a segment filter to the page and the report gets a whole lot cooler (we need to get out more!).
Instead of having separate report pages for each channel/segment, you can just use the one page and apply a blanket filter to it. This will keep your client happy, as well as speeding up the reporting process when new data is added in the future!
Flexible Results = Happy Clients.
“What’s that Client? You want to see the data broken down by gender? Wish you could segment bounce-rate by age and by channel? You got it!”
Not only does this negate the need for dozens of report pages, but it also provides the client with the flexibility to manipulate their own data each month.
Okay, we understand that not everyone needs reports as granular as these, but it is still a powerful (and free) tool that lets you get creative with how results are presented. We love it and are constantly finding new ways of applying it to make our reports more powerful.
If you manage your own campaigns and would like some help in setting up Google Data Studio reporting, please get in touch.