Dynamic dashboards with Google Looker Studio


Have you ever tried to find a new book to read when you didn’t have a specific author, title, or genre in mind? Are you looking for fiction or nonfiction, fantasy or mystery, children’s or adult’s books? The list of filters can be exhausting.

Accessing Google Analytics data can be equally exhausting. While Google Analytics 4 continues to add more ready-made reports, constant monitoring of the platform is needed to find them.

Google Looker Studio for dashboards

Google Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, simplifies the analysis and display of data/metrics, providing the following benefits:

  • Free to use
  • Easy, free access to Google data sources (other data sources are available, but at a cost)
  • Easily customizable
  • Easy to share with leadership and colleagues, with an option to schedule regular email updates
  • Combine data from multiple sources into a single dashboard

Using Google Looker Studio is easy, following the “How to” guide Google offers. If you prefer to figure it out on your own, you can explore the thousands of templates available, filterable by data source type (GA, Google Sheets, YouTube Analytics, etc.).

Sample dashboards

The following dashboards are created to help you with a U of M branded dashboard.

To adopt, or edit, these dashboards, follow these steps:

  1. Look at the GA properties/views you have access to by changing the source in the header.
  2. Update the date in the header.
  3. Filter the KPIs on the website performance page by a specific web page
    1. To filter, click on a particular web page in the table and wait for the grayed out KPIs to display the new numbers.
    2. To remove the filter, click on the page again
  4. To use the report, make a copy and start editing it to work for you and your team. Make the following changes to your dashboard:
    1. Update the report settings to default to your UA/GA4 account
      1. Select File > Report settings
      2. In the column on the right, titled “Report Settings”, change the Data source
    2. Update the date range
      1. Select the date range box in the header
      2. In the column on the right, titled “Date range control Properties” , change the Default date range. You can select from a fixed time period or from a choice of automatic date ranges.
    3. Update the Glossary page, page 2, to add/remove any relevant metrics

If you want to learn more about data visualizations,

Topics: Tips and Tricks Web Marketing Analytics