Google Data Studio: a half-baked product with good potential.
January 14, 2019
Google Data Studio: a half-baked product with good potential.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Data Studio
Data Studio is used on and off for really specific needs such as following closely a web site KPI for example. Currently, Data Studio works great with Google Analytics (GA) data. You can create OK looking dashboards using GA and make calculations between metrics. However, it's not yet ready to include outside source files and it becomes very complex to inject targets for example and calculate such KPIs as % Monthly sales vs sales targets. For this reason, we use Data Studio mainly as a quick access to GA data more than anything else.
- Quick visualization for real-time Google Analytics numbers.
- Calculations between GA metrics.
- Easy report distributions.
- Having green/red arrows to show how a metrics is fluctuating vs a defined period.
- Having control box or dials to switch between weekly and monthly views or filtering lists on different levels.
- The module to control external sources is awful and very complex and unreliable. Stick to GA data for now or use another tool such as Klipfolio to gain time.
- So far the return is very limited but it cost nothing. The major investment is time to factor in when using Data Studio. Currently there are very cheap tools like Klipfolio that will do a far better job for a fraction of the time needed in Data Studio.