Last October, I wrote a blog for webanalists.com about the launch from Google Data Studio September 28, 2016. One of the drawbacks of Google Data Studio until now was the limited number of reports you are allowed to create in the free version of Google Data Studio. However, on Feb. 2, google released the news the world that from now on it will be possible to create an unlimited number of reports even in the free version. A change that is certainly not annoying.

Why Google Data Studio?

Partly because of this, Google Data Studio has become a lot more interesting for businesses. Like with the free version of Google Analytics and Google Optimize, Google wants to open up the market for data visualization and dashboarding. Until now, Google did not have a tool purely focused on dashboards and data reporting. The dashboard capabilities within Google Analytics are very limited compared to Adobe Analytics, for example. In addition, you are also limited to one data source (only data from Google Analytics). Over the past few weeks, I dove into Google Data Studio to see what you can do with it and what the advantages and disadvantages are.

1. It's free!

The first obvious advantage, of course, is the absence of cost. However, it remains to be seen for how long it will remain free and what the final features are going to be in the free version versus the paid version. At the moment, the differences between the free and paid versions very small.

2. Easy integration and recognizable UI

A second advantage is the user-friendliness and the fact that you don't have to have technical knowledge to create a simple dashboard. Even though Google Data Studio is a new tool, you can simply log in with a Google account and find the files in your Google Drive. This makes it easy for organizations to integrate Google Data Studio. You don't need new tools that require a lot of explanation and integration/authorization.

3. Sample dashboards to get started quickly

There are a number of standard dashboards available that you can apply to your data. This works the same as Google Analytics where standard dashboards are also available. This saves a lot of work for the user.

Limitations and areas for improvement

Google Data Studio is only a beta version and there are already a number of things on Google's roadmap to be tweaked. So there are definitely still a number of improvements to be made. Here are the issues I ran into while using it.

1. Export to PDF

Data Studio is primarily intended as a dynamic dashboard. However, there is a lot of demand for being able to export the dashboards to PDF, for example. To date, you can only export 1 page at a time to PDF instead of all pages at once to 1 PDF file. This is definitely a limitation and I hope an issue that will be resolved soon.

2. Limited number of data sources that can be linked to.

In general, linking data sources in Google Data Studio is easy. When you create a new report you are given the option to link to several sources: Adwords, attribution 360, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, DCM, Google Sheets, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Youtube Analytics and on Feb. 7, Google announced That there is also a standard integration with Search Console. You notice right away that these are all Google sources. For example, there is no way to link with Excel or CSV yet.

If you do want to unlock other data, you can get creative with this by, for example, loading this data into Google Sheets first. From Google Sheets you then pull the data into Google Data Studio. This way you can still use data from different sources in your dashboards.

3. Time-intensive

The third downside is the duration of data loading and editing. The automatic caching of data sources makes this process slower than desired because the data is constantly updated during editing. To work faster, you can disable this feature in your data source linking settings.

4. Easy but limited

Setting up graphs and tables and linking them to data is very easy. A very nice feature, but unfortunately it also ensures that the formatting of these graphs, tables and dashboards is again very limited. Some limitations I encountered:

• Aligning graphs side by side is very difficult.You have to place them to the pixel yourself.
• You cannot paste individual images into Google Data Studio; you must upload them.
• You cannot crop a shape, for example an arrow, only enlarge or reduce it in the same proportions.
• You can only insert a rectangle or circle as a shape. There are no more options right now.

5. No segmentation of Google Analytics Data

Lastly, within Google Data Studio, it is now not possible to select your segments from Google Analytics and apply them to your reports or dashboards. However, this is a common complaint and Google has already indicated that it is on the roadmap. So hopefully this will be implemented soon. Want to use Google Analytics segments in Google Data Studio right now? You can do so by linking your Google Analytics data to Google Sheets. Within Google Sheets reporting you can apply segments, the data that comes out of this can be linked back to Google Data Studio. There is no direct link between Google Analytics and Google Data Studio but the result is the same.

All in all, my first impression is very positive. As we are used to from Google, the tool works very intuitively and within a short time your first dashboard is ready to use. In the end, I may not be too critical. Despite some limitations, the tool works very nicely.

I'm very curious about your experiences with Google Data Studio. What do you guys think are pros and cons of the tool?

This article was published on Feb. 9 at Webanalists.com