October New Media Breakfast: Powering Up Google Analytics with Data Studio

Google Analytics rocks.  But in many companies it still hasn’t earned the place in the boardroom it deserves. However Google’s relatively new free product “Data Studio” is the catalyst that can change that for you.  It gives the ability to deliver the numbers that really matter to you and your management team.

We’ve covered Google Analytics almost every year over the ten year history of the New Media Breakfast and it remains a much requested topic.  So yes, we will look at how to make the most of Google Analytics but we will dedicate the majority of this breakfast to covering Data Studio for the first time.

Data Studio allows you to create dashboards of the numbers.  You can pull all the metrics you look at regularly in Google Analytics into one screen.  That’s better, but not altogether different to the custom dashboards feature in Google Analytics itself.  The key difference though, is the ability to easily bring in data from sources other than Google Analytics.  That includes data from all your other systems as well as third party datasets.

Why is that exciting? For many reasons, but the two we will focus on are:

• It gives the ability to report your marketing performance in the same language used in your boardroom.
• You can include forecasts (so in essence you end up with Google Analytics data reported against business projects).

WHAT WE’LL SHOW YOU

• How someone with reasonable spreadsheet skills can pull data from Google Analytics and build Data Studio dashboards
• The sort of numbers you might want to include in your Dashboard.
• How to create a forecast.
• A real time profit and loss dashboard example.
• The power of a single old school email.

For those just interested in Google Analytics, we will also discuss various features of Google Analytics (such as enhanced e-commerce and custom set-ups) as we go.  We will, of course, also cover some of the basics as well as some of the new Google Analytics features worth diving into.

THE SPEAKER 

Tim Barlow is Managing Director and Founder of Attacat, a digital marketing agency in Edinburgh that is well renowned for helping innovative companies drive sales from search engines.  Tim has guided the New Media Breakfast audience through the maze of search engine marketing and other topics over the last 10+ years.