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Recommended
Lainey T.
Director
Marketing and Advertising, self-employed
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Lainey T.: Hi, I'm Lainey, creative marketing specialist, and I'm giving Google Data Studio four stars...
Andrew B.
SEO Manager
Computer Hardware, 10,001+ employees
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Andrew: Hi, my name is Andrew. I'm an SEO manager. I give Google Data Studio a four out of five. For...
Mallory R.
Verified reviewer
Computer Software, 501-1,000 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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Overall it's made it much easier to build robust, flexible marketing dashboards and then share them with my team. It's also helped to extract data from Ad platforms at a level of granularity that wasn't available within the ad platform itself.
I love how easy it is to put the data points into different graphs and visualizations. The UI is typical of Google. Super intuitive and user-friendly and most aspects of the product behave exactly as a user would expect (which isn't the case in my experience for softwares like Tableau). Ease of use is by far what makes Google Data Studio stand out among the crowd.
Can be hard to integrate data with certain platforms if they aren't Google owned platforms. There's also minor functionality gaps around not having all of the relevant google ads dimensions and labels accessible within data studio.
Guido N.
Verified reviewer
Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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We use it to create ecommerce monitoring dashboards for all the clients of my agency. Dashboards are shared with the clients' teams, who can access them wherever they are.
It is free. It connects natively with all Google products (Google Analytics, Google BigQuery, Optimize, Google Ads, Google Sheets). It has connectors for most data sources (some are for free, others come at a reasonable price). It lets you develop and draw your own data visualization simply using Javascript. Being a Google free product, you can find a lot of documentation, both proprietary and from end users.
It is slow (especially when sourcing data from Google Analytics: then you add the slowness of data studio to the slowness of Analytics, Merchant Center, ...). You can create nifty dashboards, but it is not as flexible as other commercial tools (Tableau has many more features and data viz templates, and an analytical & data preparation engine that have nothing to do with the simple architecture of Data Studio)
Jude C.
Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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I have a great experience using this platform.
With the platform there is ease data manipulation. One can easily view real time data on the sales funnel hence prioritizing on some main issues. One can easily visualize it with any other logins. Great platform one can use for prototyping our dashboards.
Options for visualising are missing. That is in the expensive software.
Andrew P.
Retail, 10,001+ employees
Used monthly for less than 6 months
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Overall, my experience with Data Studio has been mixed. The learning curve is definitely steep and it is not the easiest tool in terms of collaboration compared to other options on the market. Importing data can often be a pain and it is sometimes quite difficult to set up connections to refresh data sources, which makes reporting more manual and time-consuming than it should be.
Data Studio is an extremely powerful tool for reporting and has allowed our team to share out extremely in-depth reports with our clients. It's suite of features is vast and allows our teams to provide highly valued insights into data we previously never had access to. The software is extremely flexible when it comes to customization to fit the needs of our client on a case-by-case basis, which is extremely important since each client has different preferences, nuances, and objectives and Data Studio makes that customization super simple.
Since Data Studio has so many in-depth reporting features, the software itself can be confusing to adapt to and the learning curve for reporting is quite steep if you have no prior experience. It took our team a long time to learn and adapt the software and collaboration on one report was often difficult, which resulted in one member being delegated to handle reporting responsibilities. It would be nice if the Data Studio was able to incorporate task management and campaign tracking alongside its powerful reporting abilities; I think that would really push Data Studio above the competition from software such as Domo and Tableau.
Amit S.
Consumer Goods, 201-500 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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The cost of the product is free, and that is insane. We used the product for digital marketing purposes. It has all the inbuilt integration like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and third-party integration to integrate Meta Ads and Twitter Ads datasets. An easy to use application and has lots of third-party templates. Liked the huge libraries of connectors, and it is easy to set up as well.
Takes lots of time for processing because of the online tools. We can analyze the data only in online mode. The third-party integration is buggy and needs some official connectors from Google.
Christian G.
Marketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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- great tool for cross channel reporting- as a SEA Manager I can combine reporting for Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising- quick overview for performance of my Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising campaigns
- You can build dashboards easily and quickly- You can integrate data of many different tools - Also non-experts can use it
- no option for notifications- especially the performance with many visualizations or large amounts of data could be better
Claudia M.
Marketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 1-2 years
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You can have different sources on the same page, it is a great tool to visualize what is happening on your business's online presence. What I like the most is that you can see everything in one place and then take better decisions based on data.
It is not as easy to use as it seems, there can be some glitches sometimes, and when having many different connectors, the load time can take longer and sometimes you might need to refresh the dashboard a couple of times.
Iulian N.
Computer Software, 5,001-10,000 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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Easy to collaborate, setup a basic dashboard and connect with multiple data sources
No matter how often I use it, there is a certain barrier to using it for ad-hoc reporting. A spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheet) somehow always feels the natural place for this.
Shaswati P.
Higher Education, 501-1,000 employees
Used weekly for 6-12 months
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Through data studio I can able to manage my long data . I can do more document and database management
There is no such dislike for the application, i very often use the application for better results.
Mihaly C.
Verified reviewer
Construction, 51-200 employees
Used monthly for 6-12 months
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My overall experience with Google data studio was satisfactory, so I recommend it with confidence
In general, everything helps me in checking my project in more details
what didn't i like it's like at first it's a little harder to use until you get used to the given program, in general it's ok
Luis M.
Education Management, 201-500 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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I currently work in the area of data engineering, and it helps me a lot, we do analyses, we do QA of the applications, the integration with firebase, bigquery and analytics is great, so we can build processes that validate our data, and detect any anomaly in time
I love the integration with bigquery, as I already mentioned our data warehouse is there, we can build dashboards, reports, corrections, validations in minutes
it has a limited number of graphs, and deploying it is quite slow, also share it, I would like there to be more possibilities to filter by data
Brent R.
Media Production, self-employed
Used weekly for 2+ years
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Data Studio has really improved over the last year or two. It's much more stable than it used to be, and is more in depth. As a small agency, I haven't found much that is missing. Outside of setting up integrations and data sources and then creating the dashboard connections, the rest is fairly simple to set up. Customizing a dashboard is easy, and sorting data is easy once you do a couple and learn the dimensions of how data is displayed. Having a free dashboard and reporting tool that integrates directly with other Google products is awesome.
I love that it's a tool directly from the same company where I get most of my data already. I use Google Analytics and Google Ads heavily in my business, so it's awesome to have a data analysis and reporting tool that has stable connections to both of these. Being able to integrate both, and other integrations into the same dashboard is a big plus. And the depth of features has really gotten pretty...
It's a bit of a pain to get set up, and to fully integrate. The documentation, while large, is not easy to follow in my opinion. Adding a data source and then creating a dashboard using a specific source can be a little hit and miss. It shouldn't take 3 or 4 screens of options to tell my dashboard that I want to get data from a specific source. Once you get past it, it's fine. But setting up a new dashboard, and organizing dashboards, is cumbersome.
Anonymous Reviewer
Verified reviewer
Logistics and Supply Chain, 201-500 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Overall, despite its challenging user experience, it's still a great tool. The quality of the reports and charts are topnotch. For a free BI tool, it's a good value for our money
I like that it's basically free and it's easy to create good-looking reports and share them with your colleagues. We're able to basically have another BI tool at our disposal without going through a lengthy procurement and deployment process.
Connecting a database is quite challenging with Google Data Studio. The error messages are not very helpful at its current state. And sometimes it gives you random errors for no clear reason.
Anonymous Reviewer
Verified reviewer
Marketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Seeing many data sources in a single view with multiple date ranges and comparisons.
I would recommend every business used this, from small to large. The ability to combine and view google analytics, google ads and search console data is fantastic and gives you great insights into your business performance. There are also lots of templates available online to get you started for no cost.
The customisation has to come from someone with a fair bit of knowledge of the product when sharing with others. In the majority of times people will have to only have a view of the report and they won't really be able to amend or see other data within it. It is also a little slow when doing lots of data and changing the views.
Jakub H.
Marketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 1-2 years
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We were using custom reporting forms for our client work but struggled with the currentness of data and new colleagues always needed a lesson or two in understanding where to get data from, how to clean it and how to import it. Once we started to setup GDS all these things went away. The initial period was the setup of the connectors and report templates, but after that the invested time payed off well.
Creating reports can be a task which requires a lot of steps and gathering of data from all sort of sources in different formats. Putting the data together in a way that is understadable for client or basically anyone else is a task where Google Data Studio comes in and does just that. Without any hassle - data gets inside the studio and can be vizualised, cross-referenced and presented to anyone without technical knowledge.
Sometimes you need a special data from an exotic service which means either going back to basics and side-loading some exported data or writing own connector or buying access to a connector. And the system can get slow.
Michelle M.
Music, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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I had to find a cheap way to provide reporting for a client that would pull in data from a lot of different sources but the client didn't want to pay for a subscription to any of the commercially available options. I found Data Studio by mistake about three or four years ago and I haven't used any other "reporting" tool since discovering it.
What I like most about Google Data Studio is that it's free. Honestly, that's the main reason I use it, because I consult as a part-time gig with one-off projects and I simply cannot afford to buy into anyone else's "business analytics," "business intelligence," or "reporting" software tools. The fact that it works, is customizable, and is fairly easy to figure out if you've ever worked with web-based, data-driven visualizations are just icing on the cake.
Getting started with it can be a challenge, especially if you've never worked with "connectors" for database-driven projects before. The initial walk-through provided by Google is just enough to get you completely lost. I think more companies would use this tool if they provided a better introduction to how to properly set up your projects.
Matthew B.
Verified reviewer
Computer Software, 10,001+ employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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To summarize, this was the most cost-effective solution for me because I needed just Google platforms for which to generate reports, and I wanted to save money on a reporting program. If you want additional social or video reporting for a combined reporting platform, it may be more cost effective to purchase a separate reporting product than to pay for Google Data Studio to incorporate that data.
Google Data Studio's greatest asset is the fact that it is completely free to use. It's a no-brainer to use Google Data Studio if you only need to aggregate and visualize data from numerous Google products and platforms (such as Google Ads, Analytics, Search Console, etc.). You don't have to pay per connection or result for any of these products because they can all connect to Google Data Studio for free.
As a result of Data Studio's extensive reporting capabilities, the program itself can be difficult for new users to grasp, and the learning curve for reporting is rather high. With the new program, we had to spend a lot of time learning it before we could start using it, which meant that we had one person of our team responsible for reporting.
Santosh P.
Marketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Love it - pros outweigh the minor cons in a big way. Would recommend it for all digital agencies.
Part of doing good quality agency work in the digital marketing realm is taking your clients on a journey and keeping them up to date with their campaigns and digital performance. Data Studio helps integrate data from their search and social accounts in really visual dashboards. We cannot imagine our agency to function without these dashboards that take data in from Search Console, Facebook, Moz, Analytics, Google Ads, SEM Rush - you name it!
Sometimes third part integration with Supermetrics etc. can cause connectors to break randomly. Data fields being deprecated without notice also causes reports to break which is less than ideal. Finally, when you duplicate a report, the data sources are copied over which is a HUGE issue! So be careful there!
Anonymous Reviewer
Verified reviewer
Retail, self-employed
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Overall, it's fairly easy to manipulate dashboards and see specific data. When building dashboards from scratch, it can be a bit time consuming, especially when first getting started. I've found that finding templates and copying how data is pulled makes setting up new dashboards much faster.
Besides the FREE price point, it's fairly easy to get started using pre-made data templates. Templates are customizable or you can build your own dashboards to filter and see the exact information you'd like. It connects natively with all of Google's products (Analytics, BigQuery, Optimize, Ads, Sheets) making it easy to get data from multiple sources.
Dashboards can sometimes be slow to load since data is pulled in real-time. If you're new to DS, it can take some searching to get the data into the dashboard that you want. Once you understand where and how to find things, it's fairly simple to build off of that.
Jakub N.
Verified reviewer
Marketing and Advertising, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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I love how dynamic is the development process of GDS, how many new features are added each month.
It's the easiest and the most affordable data visualization tool on the market. It's quite easy to learn, just enough to jump in and create your first dashboards in a short time. Despite that, it's used by professionals in many corporate companies to visualize data and create interactive dashboards - so why not use it?
There are things that are hard to accomplish in Data Studio, like specific types of charts; some of them are confusing, like data blending; and some of them are limited, like free connectors.
Ondřej W.
Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Once you upload any data to GDS it is really fun to explore and make dashboards that can help you in any way. We have connected our internal system to Google Data Studio and visualising graphs and tables is very easy to do. Use custom dimensions and metrics, also lots of adjusments for dashboards. You can easily make a dashboard within an our that can save you and your team a lot of time and money. Automatic reporting trough gmail is also a cool feature that we use
Sometimes Google Data Studio struggles with large XML files and loading can take some time.
Varsha G.
Verified reviewer
Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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my overall experience is really great, it saves my lot of time by creating a report one time and add any other feature later on whenever is required.
I like this tool very much because of few advanced feature like- data add on from multiple resources like google analytics, adwords, search console, Google Sheet, Big Query, MySql, Google Survey, Youtube Analytics, Custom File Upload and etc. Few more other to create custom dashboard as per requirement. Do automation share report on email. It's very useful to create advance data visualization report. Also the filtration of record as per date we select is a global feature to add in report always on a same URL.
there's nothing to dislike or less like. There's possibility to add more add on related to example worksheet for marketing templates, sales and project analysis.
Barış T.
E-Learning, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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I make presentations by processing and visualizing the data I obtained through Google analytics.
An easy to use application. You can edit your KPIs and visualizations as you wish. Very effective and price performance product
There isn't any feature that I don't like. Users will see it when they start using it.
Jacob N.
Health, Wellness and Fitness, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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I'm able to integration my advertising campaign results in an affordable system and build my own reporting.
I like the many possibilities of integrations with the data studio. It helps when you have multiple advertising campaigns to report on
It is a little difficult to create your own custom reporting charts.
Jonathan W.
Marketing and Advertising, self-employed
Used monthly for 2+ years
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Overall, because I was looking to save money on a reporting software and only had Google platforms I need to report on, this made the most sense. If you need other social or video reporting added to a combined reporting platform, it may make more sense to pay for another reporting tool rather than pay to have that data added to Google Data Studio.
The best thing about Google Data Studio is that it is free. If all you need to do is combine and visual data from various Google platforms and products (i.e., Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc.), then Google Data Studio is an excellent choice. All these products can connect for free to Google Data Studio, so you don't have to pay per connector or per result.
Google Data Studio definitely isn't the prettiest or easiest reporting platform to use. At times it can feel clunky and very intense to set up. This isn't an easy plug-and-play platform for reporting. So while it is free, you will definitely have to spend some time setting up and connecting everything you want to use. You can save some time by looking for templates that others have created that you should be able to duplicate and set up.