Google Data Studio, do you still use it and what do you use it for?

[andrefiji]

We use it primarily for monthly reporting for our clients. We pull data from different places and use supermetrics as well. It has been great for that purpose.

[screamingant]

At my workplace, we use it quite extensively primarily because it is more accessible (free) and it provides native integration with BigQuery. But, yeah, it is definitely limited in some ways.

[_prtndr]

For monthly reports and quick analysis, yes indeed!

[RoelandVliet]

I just built a marketing dashboard for the company I joined with Data Studio. Also used a Supermetrics connecter to get our FB ad data into the dashboard. Mainly because there wasn’t a dashboard showing our marketing spend on performance channels, so now there is.

I found it pretty flexible and easy to work with.

[t0pz]

Love hate relationship with this tool for me. I need to use it often for clients, but i hate all the limitations and the non-existent product improvements by Google. They dgaf about tools that cant be monetized.
They bought into Looker now, which is much more advanced, but has a massive onboarding fee……

[sdsquish]

Have been considering Data Studio for over a year now for our marketing reports. I am aware of the pros, but

What are the cons?

[coffeeconcierge]

We use it for all of our clients. We’ve been able to crack some advanced integrations and so far haven’t been too limited by functionality.

[elvisofdallasDOTcom]

Checklist helpful Lee’s website for data studio resources and you’ll see that almost anything is possible if you know how to use the full functionality. Google doesn’t make that easy to learn of course ?

[elvisofdallasDOTcom]

Oh, and I use it for crazy advanced reporting and analysis to help OLA tuning.

[yabezuno]

Custom dimensions including url page consolidation, aquisition source grouping, and keyword grouping.

one-page filtering, adding filters to make reports easy.

[roll_josie]

It’s way more powerful than most people realize. There’s a lot to can do with it. We use it extensively with integrations from Salesforce, hubspot, surveymonkey and other tools.

[MediaKey-Marketing]

I feel it’s limited but free. There are so many metrics you cant combine like cost with conversion type name that i feel limits its productive use. Not sure if that can be ivercome with supermetrics as i dont have a SM license. Sometimes just using conversions isn’t good enough. Anything that involves segmentation is almost a no go. Auction insights from Google ads is in data studio but is completely broken when trying to use line graphs. Filters also seem to break things often.

[dale-jepto]

We created a free Google My Business connector for Data Studio and are seeing that over the last year there has been a big increase in people using it (and the amount of large well known businesses too), which may come down to exposure. However we are also monitoring the GitHub repo of changes for connector developers and we are seeing a lot of companies jump on board as the GDS ecosystem expands. In my opinion it doesn’t make sense for SaaS tools these days to create their own visualisation WYSIWYG or reporting system when they can make a GDS connector and then give everyone the full flexibility to create their own reports.

One of the biggest areas that is underutilised in GDS is the community visualisations. There are some great examples in the gallery that can be applied to marketing data. For example I wrote a short [blog post](https://www.jepto.com/blog/animated-keyword-ranking-report-in-data-studio) on how to animate keyword rankings over time, in 90 seconds.