 Welcome to the journey. Today we're going to talk about how to get started with Google Data Studio for your business. So technology, it's moving too fast, even for us millennials, but also for your business. There's too much data and when there's too much data, what happens? I don't know what happens. Analysis, paralysis, same thing happens when I go out to eat to a restaurant. That's actually a vegan restaurant because you know how it is, especially for your vegans and vegetarians. You go to a restaurant and you're just ordering off that side menu because there's not many options. Then you go to a vegan restaurant. Oh my gosh, you can order from the whole menu and I just sit there and the waiter comes back like five times. The point of this story, analysis paralysis. So all this analysis paralysis and all this data and all this information overload can get overwhelming, right? So Google's Data Studio is what we're going to be talking about and I'm going to be showing you doing a live little demo here and how to really kind of disseminate some of that information into a nice and easy to use dashboard. And the cool thing is it's customizable. It is a lot to take in so if you're not like super data driven, you probably should hire someone on your team to do this or hire someone to take care of this for you. We'll give you some of the basics of using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Alright, so I've never used Google Data Studio. I'm super stoked to learn more about it. I'm a little nervous because you said there's a lot to it. So it could be overwhelming. So you just go over to datastudio.google.com. Luckily, I've been here before so it types for me because I can't type. And then it's going to have you sign in if you haven't done so already. You click a button right there and then you'd launch right into essentially the dashboard. Now, what's cool about this is Google gives you a bunch of templates to kind of look at and better understand it because if you don't know what you're doing, you want something already done for you, you can just kind of pick and play with your own data. That works for me. Absolutely perfect. So let me show you like a Search Console report and what this kind of looks like. You can see, so for those of you that don't know, Google's Search Console, it essentially tells you your search rankings and information analytics. So how often your page comes up with certain keywords, how many people click through it, all sorts of great information on the search engines. And that's what this is doing here. So you can see how many impressions versus the last 30 days, URL clicks, which landing pages they've jumped on, the queries they use, like Google, Google Shop, clothing store, and then what part of the world they're in. So you get all this information. That's super helpful. And it's already created for you. You can click Use as Template if you'd like to. But again, if you have no idea where to get started, those are your best bet and then kind of pick and play from there. But we're actually going to make one from scratch. Oh boy. Are you ready? I don't know. I'm not ready, but let's go. So we're going to go ahead and click Blank Report right here. And then it's going to ask you to add a data source. Now, it has some sample data if you'd like here. But I've already added a couple of data sources from a very old website I had. Way, way back. It was called Plans Yet. The site's still live because it's like all things. You just want to keep it going. Yeah. So you click Add Your Data Source to add to that report. And it's going to throw in some content here. So right off the bat, it's going to throw in a table. We can manipulate this however we want. But it's going to show you the organic views. None, because it doesn't know what those sources are coming from. And then referrals, things like social media or other websites. But we're going to get rid of this because I want to essentially make this pretty, right? Dashboards are supposed to be pretty and easily digestible. Yeah. Let's give it a makeover. Let's give it a makeover. So we're going to have a cool little title. Let's have a shape up here like so. What color? I would love to go for kind of like an ocean, sea blue. I was thinking like sea foam green. Oh, that's it. That's it. You are a California girl. I mean, just throw some palm trees up there. And then we're going to have some text. My awesome, I told you I cannot type. My awesome report. And then on the right, you have all your style properties. So you can manipulate almost every part of the elements and graphs and data that we put in. You can modify and make it all pretty. Cool. Your font is not that pretty though. I'm working on it. She's so demanding. Bold it. Make it a little larger. White. It'll stand out. It's crisp. That's aggressive. You're aggressive if we're being honest. Oh gosh. Cool. My awesome report. Perfect, right? Yes. Now let's actually add some charts and functions. All sorts of cool stuff. So you have your overall theme before we jump into the chart. So you can style it quickly if you'd like. However, whatever works best for your brand, your business. I know people that do this for a service. They usually make this into a nice report and I print it off to their clients or send them to them. That way it looks all pretty. But we're going to choose that dark background there. I'm going to add a chart. So a couple cool things that you probably want to know about with your site is how many people are visiting your site. So if you click add chart, you can go to sessions right here and it's going to pop up sessions. Now I can't see it. It changed. Look at that. The themes and the styles, it all works together. So it has my page views. It's like a new. It's magic. Something like that. Google smart, I guess. Very smart. But I want to still manipulate some things. I want to add a border. Okay. So when we're looking at page views, 1.5,000. Total ever in the life of this. So glad you asked. So on the right-hand side here, you have data and you have style. So style makes it all pretty. Data is the actual information it's pulling from. And you can see down here, it shows the last 20 days. Oh, okay. And if you want to do comparison date, you can choose none. That little drop down there. Choose that. We'll just do previous period. And that's going to do the previous 30 days. Got it. Let that update. So you can see there's a 24% increase in my page views. Now I have that all nice and pretty. And what's cool about this is if you want to copy and paste it, you can right click, copy, paste. Paste the same information in. But I don't want page views and page views and page views. I mean, as a business owner, I want page views. But as far as data goes, it doesn't make sense. No. So what else do you want to look at? So on the left-hand side or right-hand side, right-hand side and left-hand side, it's confusing. I haven't had enough coffee. But you can change the metric. So if I don't want page views, I can choose something else down the page. You can kind of go through and see what makes the most sense for your business. But what if you don't know what makes sense for your business? Use a template. And then learn from there. You're a data person. No, because there is a ton of information that it gives you. You can kind of go around and play with this and add different charts. Like, I can add a geographic map so I can see where everyone's coming from. That's probably a good idea, because if my target audience is the U.S., but I see most people coming from maybe the U.K. or Australia. What about your local business? And you just want to know what cities are, you know, within the neighborhood. Like, who's coming to my bar in North Park in San Diego? Like, are they coming over from, you know, La Jolla or University Heights or to help you know where to market? Oh, you can get, okay. You get super granular. Great, that was my question. Yeah, so under dimension right here, you can change. So city, there's continent, there's country. There's all different modifications that you can add here. As you can see that granular data. Like, I'm getting a ton of people from Washington, which is crazy, because we're in Washington right now. I'm from Texas and things like that on a site that I haven't updated in a while, but people are still going to. And then there's lots of other cool charts you can add here as well. So if I want to see a time series chart, I can pop that right there. But back to like analysis paralysis here. I kind of, I'm already freezing up just with all the options. Right. It is a ton, which is why I would kind of recommend going in and add a chart and then seeing what it pops up by default. So you can see kind of the information that it brings. Like this will show a pie chart of the organic versus referral and then traffic that it can't understand. But on the left-hand side of this column here, you can basically kind of go through and add all this stuff. Like this Google data studio is, is complicated, but if, if you kind of take the time to better understand it or at least some of the data points or watch tutorials like this one or even use one of the templates to kind of start from all the information is there. And then once you have it set, it constantly updates and updates and updates. So you don't have to modify it again. That dashboard will always be there for you to manipulate. I like that. Because then it's, you know, the work that you've done, you can just build upon and save you time in the future when you check. Like, hey, you know, what are my page views now? Or how much of this traffic was organic versus referral? Exactly. Which how do they know what would be organic versus referral? Just curious. So organic traffic is traffic that came from search engines. Okay. So they're searching whatever keywords that would pop up my website. Yeah. And then they click on it. Referral are links from other websites, which is commonly like social media or someone other, some blog that has linked to your page. Got it. Things like that. Okay. Great. Okay. So what I've gathered so far, yes, this is overwhelming, but we're seeing a lot of data. This is Google analytics. Can you pull any other data into this report? For example, we talk a lot about YouTube analytics. So yeah, if you want to, if you're modifying a page and you want to add more data sources, you can do that inside of this dashboard under resource and then manage added data sources. It does it all. It does it all. So I have all website data here for Google analytics. I want to click add data source. Holy smoke. You can see all of the data source you can add. Obviously, Google is going to let you pull in all of their data into your dashboard, which is super cool. YouTube is owned by Google. So you can add that there. But there's also partner connectors as well. So it goes beyond just Google's data, which is super cool. So there's 162 current partners available. It's like Amazon ads, ad role, app nexus, asana connector, all sorts of things that you can pull into a dashboard. So think of all the different sites you go into now to find different analytics, whether it's your sales data, your website traffic, things like that. You can essentially build your dashboard right here and have your team modify it and things like that. What's cool is that this is all done in the cloud, if you will. So people can modify it at the same time and be here at the same time. Real time. Okay, this is great. Your report is in fact awesome. There's a lot of information here, but how do I use it for my business? So for coffee and cake flips. Yeah, I think the most important reason to use Google Data Studio is because it's essentially a one-stop shop once you have it all set up. I mean, think about how much time it's going to take you to log into Google Analytics, then start to look through all the information it gives you from page views to bounce rates to all these different things, and then search console, then YouTube, and then everywhere else. Instead, you can have one dashboard with the metrics that makes the most sense to you. So if you're really focused on increasing your website sales conversions, you can have that up here, their sales conversions, and then traffic, and then whatever makes sense for you in one place. You can only check that once. You're good, and you can spend the rest of the time to do whatever you want. Run your business, coffee and cake flips, go on a trip to Tahiti, or Spain, or Barcelona, wherever you just got back from. Do whatever you need to do. All right, nearly that report was in fact awesome. Are you feeling overwhelmed? I'm feeling overwhelmed. But hey, if you've used Google Data Studio before and you have some tips, comment below. Also, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel and ring that bell. See you at these episodes first. This is The Journey. We'll see you next time.