Google Data Studio Reviews

Google Data Studio is a free product and easily integrates with Google Analytics. It's a very easy to use product and needs no extensive training or sessions to understand. It works on real-time databases.

From a design and features point of view, it's lagging at a few points, otherwise it's a phenomenal product to use.

As and when there was any issue with the product, Google and supporting teams were ready to provide support and listen and work on the features required in this product

It's great for most of what we need to run reports on, but buying connectors could probably get expensive. If you need to connect more than five data sources, it might be cheaper to use another third-party Analytics reporting tool. However, in most cases, we find that it allows us to show data in various types of graphs and charts, and add our own color palette, logo, etc.

Google's support is terrible, no matter what product you're using. A four is generous, and only because I've never had to use their support.

Displaying direct data from any analytics tools is excellent, complex analysis or calculations is difficult directly in Google Data Studio.

I've never reached out for support.

Google Data Studio is a great tool to manage data, build dashboards for C and management level.

Google has a nice community, but it is hard to get personal support.

I actually recommended Google Data Studio to other departments in our company. I think it's a great tool to easily create visuals out of data from Google analytics. No major technical skills are needed.

I wouldn't say less appropriate, but maybe a bit harder to integrate with the ads platforms, we need to go through a third party.

There's a lot of documentation online and a big community of users that could be helpful.
I never had to contact their support team.

Google Data Studio is well suited in scenarios where analysts are trying to create quick visual dashboards using Google Analytics and BigQuery sources of clickstream and transactional data. So, analysts can share those dashboards with their marketing managers or category analysts. Google Data Studio is not well suited in scenarios where analysts are trying to correlate vast amounts of datasets from sources that don't talk to each other, or a data lake doesn't exist. The reason is: Google Data Studio is not an ETL tool. So, unless a data model has been created and an ETL process is running against that data model and is managed by an architect, Google Data Studio should not be used to correlate.

I rated the overall support for Google Data Studio a five because it offers limited real-time chat of phone support. The best resource available to get analyst questions on Google Data Studio reporting and integration capabilities answered, is an online Google support portal with text and video tutorials: https://support.google.com/datastudio. But the analyst needs to know the correct keyword(s) to find accurate answers to his or her technical questions. Or be in the correct category of questions: Connect, Visualize, Share or Manage. So, the existing self-help portal works fine to answer basic questions on metrics, dimensions, how to integrate a data source, or how to create a custom report. It doesn't do a great job of answering advanced questions on why data doesn't match between Data Studio and Google Analytics. Why data is not showing up even though the dashboard sources have been refreshed, or how to create a custom Google Sheets to auto-update dashboard every month.

It's well suited if you have a report that you want to automatically refresh with new data. I.e. if you have a monthly report, in the same format from month to month, you can keep appending new data to your source data file, and refresh the report with minimal effort. This also allows you to collect historical data too, so you can always reference previous time periods, or change the date range of your report to answer any historical performance question that comes up.

I would recommend Google Data Studio to a colleague who works for a larger company with robust marketing and IT teams. The platform could be overwhelming for smaller teams and would be more effectively used by professionals with experience in analytics, marketing, and web development. The ROI would be quite low if used in smaller businesses.

I personally have not utilized support on Google Data Studio. If it means anything, I have not needed it.

It is the best free tool for data visualizations. Especially if you stick to native google apps connecting to it. I've built some pretty looking data viz and it has helped us to automate marketing reporting.

It has been a hassle with external data sources. I know it has those capabilities, but setting it up hasn't been easy.

I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.

Google Data Studio (GDS) is best used when the need of the hour is a single live document with data over time. The usage of date filters and other filters is very useful. The place where it doesn't excel is that it's still in beta phase and sometimes reports break for no reason.

No more manually checking different info about your store from a number of sources. Everything is combined in one place.

I don't have any experience with Google customer support, but there is a really big society that is happy to help with your issues.

Marketing agencies who provide their clients with monthly, quarterly, or annual performance reports.

Businesses who want to create a marketing dashboard for their organization.

Google Data Studio is a fantastic investment. I honestly recommend investing in all of the free Google marketing tools. They offer great connectivity to each other and other platforms. They compile a large variety of outside data along with internal data from a company website or marketing assets they have deployed on the internet.

Google does not have the best help line or support system. It can be difficult to get help, get on the line, have issues be resolved or get in contact with a real human being at all.

One year into use, Google Data Studio seems to be really well suited for organizations already in the G Suite ecosystem. It has a very similar feel/use to other Google tools like Drive and Sheets. Access control is also easy if the organization is already on Google. It is also affordable since it is free. That makes it within reach of small organizations who cannot afford products like Tableau.

Google Data Studio is supported in the same way its other products are supported. In practice we have hardly needed support from Google because the products are so easy to use. The help available online is very useful and meets our needs. Long-term hopefully the user community will continue to grow, which will be even better for support.

Google Data Studio is a great tool if you're on a budget. For a free tool, it's amazing. It has some great features, the kinds of things you might find in a very expensive product, and it's completely free. We've used Google Data studio to visualize a lot of our marketing data. If you want basic reports, you don't need to pay for a product.

For a free tool, there isn't much you can do for support. Similar to Gmail, there isn't a support line or email you can reach out to, but that's to be expected with a free tool.

If you are looking for a free data visualization tool or are a smaller business that uses mainly Google entry products and a few outside analytical tracking tools, then I would highly recommend Google Data Studio. Instead, if you evaluate data from a lot of third-party tools or you have an enterprise software solutions, it would be better suited to look into a paid data visualization tool like Tableau.

It is well suited if Google supports the data connections you need or if you can push data into Google Sheets and leverage the information directly from there. It is less suited for a company with a desire for many data connections to pull in and/or a company that doesn't leverage the G Suite in general.

Data studio allows the company to analyze data obtained, to perform simple reports that present data with high-quality graphics. It is convenient to use Data Studio to analyze data that can generate strategies that improve the productivity of the company.

I really love Google Data Studio and highly recommend it, with the understanding that it is a limited, free dashboard program, and does not have the robust analysis capability of an enterprise-level dashboard platform like Tableau or Power BI. It is perfect for dashboarding Google Suite data -- from Sheets, Ads, DCM/DBM, Analytics, etc. -- and readily ingests data from those sources.

If robust analysis on large datasets (>150,000) is a requirement, Data Studio is best deployed as a test-case or proof-of-concept before implementing a more comprehensive, powerful solution. It can ingest CSV and XLSX files, and community connectors/automation. This allows for data ingestion to come from platforms outside the Google Suite -- and while these connectors are generally reliable, they aren't maintained by Google and therefore can break, go out of date, etc.

If a user is looking for a free data visualization tool, I'd highly recommend using Google Data Studio as a starting point. As you use GDS, you'll gain a better understanding of the features you'll actually use and perhaps some that you wish GDS had. You could then take that insight into your purchase decision of a more robust data viz software like Domo or Tableau.

If a user is looking for a tool that will connect several custom data sources or making very advanced data visualizations, GDS is more than likely not a good option. It is limited with its connections and calculated metrics, as well as the type of visualizations you can create.

If you have a clean data set that requires no/little manipulation, and you want to look at KPIs on a recurring/continuous time frame, then Google Data Studio would a good option for you. However, if that's not the case, then you might want to consider other tools such as Tableau or Power BI.

Really depends on the need. If it's to produce a dashboard that needs to look good and is reliable, I would use a different tool. However, if that colleague is an analyst, I think Data Studio is a quick and free tool you need to have in your analytics toolbox.

Well Suited: Simple/complex reports as long the source is from a Google app; for super quick reporting with an Excel file; If you are not a data professional but still want to start with reporting. Less appropriate: If you have used an enterprise reporting tool such as Power BI or Tableau, you might not see this as an equivalent tool or replacement tool.

Google Data Studio is well suited for those that aren't ready or willing to make the leap to an enterprise solution, as such solutions tend to demand a larger price commitment, usually require a year-long contract, and also require someone with some background with BI tools.

I think Google Data Studio is great for teams that are reporting on complex websites and/or have multiple traffic sources and campaigns, and want to pull key data into one place. It's especially useful if you don't have a dedicated analytics staff, as it does cut down on reporting time. You do need to have some analytics knowledge to use the tool, however; otherwise what's being displayed could be misleading or confusing. The takeaways are just as important as the data itself.