Using Google Data Studio

I have had many interests and job/career-things over my life time and I have slowly learned that the one thing they all have in common is color.

I love making things colorful - mixing chemicals together to make different colored chemicals, growing fun colorful bacteria, playing with fun colored pills*, playing with lighting gels and making stages different colors, literally coloring with sharpies**, and, most recently, moving colors around on a screen. I love colors.

So is it any wonder that I got super excited when I realized I could put all my email data into a Google Sheet and then make fun colorful graphs and charts to make the data pretty with Google Data Studio (GDS). No it is not. Or, it shouldn't be.

With my usual aplomb I jumped in screaming "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING!" aaaaand was promptly confronted with a whole bunch of errors.

Which was very frustrating.

I had spent all of last year building beautiful—but very colorless—spreadsheets to display all the email data in an effort to make sense of what our email programs were doing. I just wanted to see my data in all it's colorful glory: a pretty scatter plot, some nice colorful bars, or even a fancy pie chart!

Yeah. Something beautiful like that. Isn't that purdy?

As you can see, I got my pie chart (And then some!) But how did I get there from the screen full of errors and all the hair pulling?

Well, first I turned to Najmah Salam who wrote... maybe not "the book", but she did write an amazing how to that made me realize that although my spreadsheets looked awesome, they were not going to cut it.

Cleaning up all the data was my starting place (fun? Never, but usually always necessary). Najmah recommends grabbing the data from your ESP (Email Service Provider, for those non-email geeks reading this) and then using GDS to calculate open rates, click through rates, and all the awesome metrics I use on a daily basis as an email marketer. All the metrics that I had been calculating and collating in Google Sheets. My first big takeaway was to give GDS the raw data, do the calculations there instead of in Sheets.

So, Najmah's article was a great start. But I wanted to go beyond my ESP's metrics.

Since I wanted to include data from Litmus, I created my own spreadsheet and pulled in the data myself. I've got a tab where I collect the analytics from my ESP and from Litmus (opens, clicks, read rates, MPP opens, and more). Then I have a tab for link data (clicks on specific links and URLs). I'll probably have more tabs as I figure out what else I want to report on.

I soon ran into a road block: having that data was great, but I wanted to turn it into charts that would visually answer a bunch of questions beyond the normal email metrics. Litmus and Marketo both have dashboards that show me open rates, click through rates, deliverability rates, etcetera, etcetera. I wanted more.

Specifically I wanted to create that pie graph above so I could figure out where people were clicking and what they were clicking on. I knew that MPP was having an impact on open rates, but I wanted to be able to see it. I knew these were possible, but I couldn't quite figure it out.

I turned to Udemy. I am not a huge fan of Udemy. But mostly because the courses weren't well organized and I ended up getting an out dated course on accident. Also finding a course was a pain. But that might have just been me being impatient and wanting to jump in instead of taking my time to research different courses and instructors. I'll save you some of my stress: here's a more recent course that I have added to my list.Anyways.... Even with the outdated course, I learned a lot. I was able to understand GDS better and create more complex custom calculations and get some ideas for different kinds of reports. And, I finally figured out how to make that pie chart.

I think the biggest help for me, though, wasn't actually email related. While I was taking the Udemy course, I also set up spreadsheets for keeping track of my finances so I could play around on GDS with that data as well. This allowed me more data to play with and gave me opportunities to work with GDS outside of work. And most of my major breakthroughs were done while playing with my own data.

Once I had figured out GDS with my data, I could go back in and create dashboards for work much faster (and with significantly less errors) than when I started.

Fly or flop?

There are things I still want to be able to report on that are not in my current dashboards, but I am learning how to accept with perfect being the enemy of done. Having some dashboards is better than having none and it gives me something to build off of. So I'm flying right now, but I'm sure I'm due for a flop soon: new data means more insights, but it also means more errors as I figure it all out.

Til next month; take chances, make mistakes, get messy!Carin*I worked at a pharmacy. I really liked counting out the different colored pills. There was something very satisfying about counting them out, putting them in bottles, and then putting the label on. Less so when I had to tell people how much they owed. 😞**Quality testing Sharpies. That was a fun job. I kind of miss it some days. I do not miss the commute though.

Learning a new skill can be daunting. Especially at the beginning when you're bound to fail. A lot. Getting used to failing is not a pleasant experience, but it is necessary. Pushing through the failure is (usually) totally worth it. You come out the other side wiser, with a new skill, and in a better place than where you started.

(Having said that I still haven't figured out how to do this with exercise. If you've got some tips, please email me.)

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