Integrate Google Data Studio to Marketing data: An Easy Guide 101

Why Data Integration Matters for Marketers?

This blog aims to show you how you can integrate Google Data Studio to marketing data. But before that, let us look at why data integration is essential to succeed in marketing.

Google Analytics, Facebook, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, Twitter… As marketers, you are on so many platforms. All of them are generating marketing data and managing all of them at the same time gets complicated. To acquire new customers, retain existing ones while knowing which platform is creating what sort of impact, marketers need constant access to data.

You could have the largest pile of data in the world, but if you don’t see the complete picture, any conclusions you come up with are bound to be erroneous.

Your marketing data might be coming from dozens of different sources. Integrating your data from so many locations to one place will determine whether your marketing campaign will achieve success or simply die away. Data Integration is indeed the future of marketing.

Here is an overview of what you will cover in this blog:

Table Of Contents

• Problem with a data silo
• What is Google Data Studio?
• Features of Google Data Studio from a Marketing Perspective
• Why do you need Google Data Studio?
• Google Data Studio Connectors
• How you can use them as a marketer?
• Ways for Marketers to Use Google Data Studio
• Steps to Connect Google Data Studio to Marketing Data
•  What is Missing in Google Data Studio?
•  Conclusion

Problem with Data Silos

Your marketing campaign feeds on the feedback from the market and a great chunk of feedback is in the form of data. The problem is every source of data has its special form. They don’t sit together very well. This creates invisible barriers between marketing data coming from different sources. Unless the barriers are broken, clarity in your campaign will always be elusive.

These barriers, also known as data silos, will not only hide the complete picture but will slow down your pace. You will only have access to your fragment of data, and often you won’t even know what you might be missing. It might take ages to get the data you need.

You end up waiting for things to move forward most of the time. Frustration will be the norm rather than the excitement of discovery!

And we all know that in today’s volatile world, waiting for data means getting outdated data. This means wasting your budget and campaigns that simply don’t take off. While the opposite is also true. The guys who simply see the whole picture quickly actually end up winning without breaking too much sweat.

What is Google Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is a business intelligence (BI) tool that is available for free. It allows you to create centralized reports from various data sources across the web—or even your platform.

This business intelligence program makes it simple to create visually appealing and interactive reports and dashboards. Google Data Studio in Marketing is an invaluable tool for marketers because the dashboards are fully customizable and easy to share.

Google Data Studio in Marketing assists marketers in making decisions that help them achieve their objectives by transforming raw data into strategic information. The risks of failure are reduced because the decisions are based on data.

The Data Studio is a popular data visualization tool provided by Google. It allows its users to pull data from different sources and create dashboards and visualizations. This makes it easy for your teams spread across different departments within the organization to understand data.

Data Studio allows its users to create visualizations using data combined from multiple sources. However, it doesn’t allow you to unify data from more than 5 sources. Data Studio enhances your visualizations via its appealing dashboards. Moreover, you can use this tool to generate reports that will allow you to study the sales performance of your product and the effect of your marketing strategies. 

Features of Google Data Studio from a Marketing Perspective

• Easy-to-use Dashboard: You must visualize them in a meaningful format because you can easily weed out information using Google Data Studio. Dashboards are useful in this situation. You can create dashboards in the Data Studio to help you understand the story your data is telling as well as the actions you need to take.

The dashboards that Google Data Studio creates allow you to get quick answers to your business or website’s questions and make the best marketing decisions when they’re needed.

The user interface (UI) of Google Data Studio’s dashboard is modeled after Google Drive. If you’ve used Drive before, you’ll recognize this interface.

Here’s a quick rundown of what the dashboard has to offer:

• You can use the Search Data Studio Box to look for reports, templates, data sources, and anything else in Data Studio.
• Create new Reports, data sources, and Explorers using the “Create” tab.
• The “Recent” section allows you to access the most recent Reports, Data Sources, and Explorer quickly.
• Pre-made templates derived from various data sources can be found in the Templates section. You can easily alter these to meet your specific requirements.

• Easy Data Transformation: The role of data transformation in determining your next steps is crucial. This is one of the features that Google Data Studio provides. No matter how many data sources you use, Google Data Studio in Marketing turns raw data into actionable business intelligence. The “Explorer” feature makes this possible. You can use the Explorer function to work with your data and:

• the addition of dimensions
• use mathematical formulas
• use custom formulas and arithmetic operators

These enable you to turn your data into useful information.

• Powerful Data Visualization: Data transformation is a great way to turn data into information that’s easy to understand. Data visualization, on the other hand, takes this to a whole new level. Simply put, humans are visual creatures who process images much faster than they do words or numbers. Google Data Studio creates reports and dashboards to help you visualize your data. You can make graphs, tables, maps, and other visual aids out of your data. Data visualization makes information more understandable. The visuals’ interactive nature also makes for engaging presentations.

• Connect Multiple Data Sources: You can connect multiple data sources with Google Data Studio in Marketing. There are 510 connectors available to access your data, with 18 from Google’s suite of platforms and the rest from third parties. Integrate google data studio to marketing data on a single platform allows you to get a complete picture of what’s going on in your company. It also allows you to get a sense of what’s going on in your industry. Google Data Studio is capable of combining data from a variety of popular sources. These data can be used for analysis and reporting within the Data Studio. You use a variety of tools on a regular basis, ranging from CRMs to Google or Facebook Analytics, and we lose a lot of data. Furthermore, we frequently struggle to determine what is critical to our business and what is not.

• Easy Collaboration and Data Sharing: With Google Data Studio’s real-time collaboration feature, you can invite others to view or edit your dashboards at your leisure. Changes are saved automatically, and version history is kept, just like on other Google platforms. You can easily share your reports with clients or team members in addition to collaborating. A notification email will be sent to the recipient, along with a link to the data. One of the most useful features of Google Data Studio is that it allows you to share your findings with your team, including charts, reports, and company brand dashboards, just like Google Drive files. This makes sharing and collaboration within a simple reporting tool easier than ever.

• Customizable Templates: It can be time-consuming and difficult to create reports from scratch. Google Data Studio in Marketing has pre-built report templates to help you get started quickly. Because they’re fully customizable, all you have to do now is fill in the blanks with your information and tweak the images to your liking. This will save you a lot of time, if not days.

Why You Need Google Data Studio

Analyzing Excel files to create reports is the old way. Why would you do that when you have a free tool by Google that lets you pull data from Google Ads, Analytics, Search Ads 360 and so many other sources? Google Data Studio in Marketing has pre-built connectors for each of these sources to ensure ease of use. You can build awesome marketing dashboards using Google Data Studio.

A marketing dashboard is a window into your performance in the market. It should show the important metrics and KPIs in a visual form. The metrics could be about customers, the product, the sources, etc. 

Some of the metrics that are usually tracked are the number of leads generated, the number of deals closed, ROI of Ads, weekly or monthly performance, future goals, etc.

You can drag and drop to build a cool, compact, and interactive dashboard in a matter of minutes! You don’t need any technical knowledge to use Data Studio. So, it saves you from spending hours poring through spreadsheets.

You can also blend data from various sources with JOIN keys to create visualizations.

Google Data Studio lets you select from a wide range of visualization tools. You can modify the visualization to suit your needs and all of this is very intuitive.

Google Data Studio Connectors

To visualize your data, you need to first connect all your marketing data to Google Data Studio. You will have to use Google Data Connectors to do this.

In a nutshell, Data Studio connectors broadly fall into two categories: 

• Free Connectors, Connectors built and supported by Google.
• Partner Connectors, Connectors are built and supported by Data Studio partners. 

Google Data Studio currently provides 20 Google connectors. Check out the free connectors list:

1. Google Analytics
2. Google Ads
3. Google sheets
4. BigQuery
5. File Upload
6. Amazon Redshift
7. Campaign Manager 360
8. Cloud Spanner
9. Cloud SQL for MySQL
10. Display & Video 360
11. Extract Data
12. Google Ad Manager 360
13. Google Cloud Storage
14. Google Surveys
15. Microsoft SQL Server
16. My SQL
17. PostgreSQL 
18. Search Ads 360
19. Search Console
20. Youtube Analytics

Google Data Studio reports can be shared very easily using links and can be downloaded as a PDF. If you want to see how easy it is to make a Google Data Studio report, look into this.

To sum up, Data Studio is a Google product, you can connect with many sources to get a unified look, you can blend data from different sources, it is very easy and intuitive to use, and you can make cool and interactive reports super-fast, it is easy to share and it is free. So just try it out!

How you can use them as a marketer?

You can engagingly present your data with Google Data Studio in Marketing.

You’re inundated with data from your CRM, social media analytics, Google Analytics, and other sources. Knowing which data is useful and which isn’t can be extremely useful, but manually separating the types takes a long time.

Data isn’t a cure-all for your marketing woes. Data must clearly show what actions need to be taken to run data-driven marketing campaigns.

Google Data Studio in Marketing shines in this area.

While your built-in analytics reports provide raw data, your Google Data Studio dashboard restricts access to only the most important information. You can create dashboards with Google Data Studio in Marketing that answers specific questions about your business, marketing campaigns, or audience.

As a result, deciding what actions to take becomes easier.

Ways for Marketers to Use Google Data Studio

To answer that question, let’s take a look at a few ways you can use Google Data Studio in your marketing efforts.

• Get a Clear Picture of Your Target Audience: Marketers must be aware of their target audience. This entails compiling a large amount of data and connecting the dots to create a picture of your ideal customer. You can use Google Data Studio in Marketing to clean up a lot of data from various sources and turn it into useful information. However, this data still needs to be refined before it can be used in business. Google Data Studio assists you in doing so in a visually appealing manner so that all of the dots begin to tell a story. Google Data Studio is a fantastic tool for turning data into stories that reveal demographic and psychographic information about your audience, such as:
  • goals and pain points in behavior
  • It’s simple to create buyer personas with all of this data expertly painted onto a canvas. As a result, you’ll be able to create more targeted and personalized campaigns, potentially increasing conversion rates.

• Measure Your Content Marketing Performance: Content marketing is a powerful tool for reaching and converting your target audience into customers. However, determining the success of a campaign can be difficult. Google Data Studios comes to the rescue in this situation. You can use the platform to generate reports based on Google Analytics data. The reports can be customized to display all of the key metrics you’ll need to assess the success of your content marketing campaigns.

• Share Your Wins and Expertise on Social Media: Another clever way to use Google Data Studio in Marketing is to use social media to share your accomplishments and expertise. It only takes a few clicks to embed your reports on the platform. People enjoy seeing products in action, but even more so when they see results. One way to do this is to import data into Google Data Studio and create a beautiful report. You can share the link to your report on social media platforms of your choice. Social media is a powerful tool for highlighting your accomplishments. You can outshine your competitors and woo new customers by including beautiful reports in the equation.

Steps to Integrate Google Data Studio to Marketing Data

It is really simple to integrate Google Data Studio to marketing data. Your data can be in a Google Sheet, Google Ads, or a database. It doesn’t matter. The steps are the same.

Step 1: This is the first step to Integrate Google Data Studio to Marketing Data. As soon as you try to create a new report in Google Data Studio, you will be prompted to add data to the report. You will see the list of connectors and you can select the source. In this case, I want to connect Google Ads marketing data to Google Data Studio. So I will select Google Ads. This

Step 2: Next you need to authorize Google Data Studio to connect to the data and add your account details. This is a crucial step to Integrate Google Data Studio to Marketing Data.

Step 3: Select the item you want to add to the report.

That’s it, you can Integrate Google Data Studio to Marketing Data.

What is Missing in Google Data Studio?

Although the above process looks very simple, it is not complete. There are 20 Google Connectors as of now. But you might be having data that you need to access from dozens of other sources. You probably need to connect to Hubspot, Stripe, Facebook Ads, etc. Google Data Studio doesn’t have in-built connectors to these sources. 

Conclusion

You simply cannot afford to wait for data to cross the organization’s silos, which act as barriers. The only way to leverage the data that flows in through so many sources is to get them in real-time and from an integrated source.

You have now seen why you need to integrate Google Data Studio to marketing data and how you can connect your Google Data Studio to marketing data. Share with us the challenges you face when trying to analyze marketing data in the comments below! We would love to hear from you.