Maximising Marketing Insights with Looker Studio

Lecture Slides

About the speaker

Lecture Transcript

Sponsor Introduction

So the next headline sponsor that we have is the Women Techmakers community. That’s a community just like ours for women in tech. They’re, of course, more tech focused and more focused on Google products as well. But they are a Google- owned community and they run it and they develop it and create amazing programs worldwide.

So they provide visibility, community and resources for women in technology. And actually we got funding through them for this event because I’m an ambassador for them. I highly, highly, highly encourage you to check out the program, sign up as an ambassador, because all of you in the room are already working with Google product.

So if you mentor other women, if you speak at conferences, if you create at least one Digital resource of any kind and that could be a LinkedIn post, a blog post, a video, anything at all four times per year, you can become an ambassador for them and they have amazing opportunities for attending Google events for you to organize your own events like we’re doing here.

And essentially, they provide a ton of support for women in tech. So highly, highly encourage you. But actually, I will leave you with someone from Google to explain what the program is about in just, I, I loved, by the way, this video, cause it’s just so me, they say and in the thumbnail, they say they’re going to explain the program in 60 seconds, and the video is actually two and a half minutes long, which I love, I love this kind of audacity from Google.

Like, yeah, sure. Yeah. Totally 60 seconds. Please trust me on this. Let’s hear it from them.

Speaker Introduction

Onto Chloe Christine that will be teaching us how to be maximizing marketing insights with the help of Looker Studio. A little bit about Chloe. She is a data expert specializing in helping businesses and agencies make sense of their website and SEO and PPC data. She offers a range of services, including Google ads, management, auditing, SEO data analysis, and reporting automation for both agencies and for freelancers as well.

And on LinkedIn, you’ll find her sharing tips and tricks as your ‘BFF on all things data’. I absolutely love this. She is proficient in setting up an auditing GA4, implementing conversion, tracking, analyzing and visualizing data to provide actionable insights. And she also works with Google Tag Manager and GA4 to create custom JavaScript variables and all of the stuff. She essentially combines basically every session that we’ve talked about so far.

So, a great person to talk to us about visualization and Looker Studio and a fun fact for her is that she is basically a local. To Bulgaria as a country, in my eyes, because she actually lived here for two months a few years ago. She was a digital nomad for over 2 years. So, anyone interested in that kind of lifestyle, or her experience of Sofia. I know I am for sure. I’d love to chat to her after her lecture. Give it up for Chloe!

Lecture by Chloe Christine

Thank you. Hello. That was quite the introduction. Thank you. I need this clicker. So, I’m going to talk to you all about Looker Studio or Data Studio, as it was called formerly. I’ll try not to bore you to death and give you a headache. With this, but if you’re not aware, Looker studio or Data studio basically a data visualization tool, it makes, you can create really cool reports, analytics.

So, anything that you’ve done from all the cool stuff that they’ve been talking to you about with ads and tag manager and all your Google analytics stuff, you can put it into visualization with Looker studio. Anyone can use it. There’s a free version. There’s also a paid version. Frankly, it’s probably not worth upgrading to the paid version for the vast majority of people.

But it’s free. It turns complex raw marketing data into clear and actionable insights. Ideal for any budget. And you can build really cool stuff. It will help you build and automate Presentations if you’re one of those people that has to give marketing presentations once a month every quarter to a board of directors or higher ups in your organization and it takes you weeks and weeks and weeks to gather all that data together You can always create something like this where it will just update automatically.

You can take screenshots from it, or you can even create a page-by-page report. So, I tend to break data visualization down generally into two kind of sections- dashboards and then page by page stuff, which is more like a PowerPoint presentation that you would just download and send to whoever, whenever you needed to.

So, we do this for our Google ads reporting for clients. So, we have like an overview page and then we’ll have some long term KPIs and then like a breakdown of some slightly more in-depth information. If they want to look through that, I can almost guarantee you the vast majority of them don’t but there you go.

There’s a whole range of different things that you can connect into Looker Studio. So, you’ve got all your Google tools that you guys have been talking about, Google Ads, Google Analytics Google Search Console. And they’re all free. There are also some paid connectors, so you can use things like super metrics, powermine analytics, reporting ninja, and that’ll give you a whole host of additional platforms, things like TikTok ads, basically all your social media platforms, Semrush you can get Ahrefs data in there, pretty much any platform that you might be using on a day to day basis can probably import data into Looker Studio if you want to. There are even some really weird ones. Someone asked me once about a connector for CRM that’s only available in the Netherlands and lo and behold, there is a connector for it. If you’re also like super, super savvy with technology, you can use APIs for building your own connectors.

To be honest, if you don’t really know what you’re doing with that, I probably wouldn’t recommend it. Just use one of the paid connectors. Reporting Ninja, especially if it’s for social media data, super cheap, costs us like 30$ a month. And you can connect like 30 accounts for every single main social media platform that you could possibly want.

A lot of people complain that Looker Studio can be a bit slow, and it can, I’m not denying that. But there is an option for something. If you, when you connect your data in, look for the extract data source. And what this does is preloads your data into like the back end of the system. You can set it to daily, weekly, monthly, however often, and then your reports will load much, much, much more quickly.

Here’s little, Example of what that looks like.

So, reporting for SEO data. This one’s, my favourite. SEO and PPC, I’ll be honest. So, you can track pretty much anything you want. The most common things I think for SEO is organic traffic keywords and relevant keyword data, like your average position, impressions, et cetera.

Impressions click through rate and conversions or Key events as they’re officially called, but I’m not sure we’ve quite moved on to actually calling them key events yet. I think we’re still on the conversion’s bandwagon, I certainly am, and you can do some really cool stuff with your SEO data that you can’t do very easily through things like Google Search Console or Google Analytics.

So, for example, here, one of the things we like to look at from an SEO perspective we call this a click gap analysis, but I’ve seen it called a few different things. We’ll look at the Average position in the last 28 days versus the previous. So, you could do it over three months versus previous three months. We look at impressions. We also look at clicks, but it wouldn’t fit on the thing. And we look at the difference between the last three months versus the previous. So, we can actually see where we’ve got growth and where we’ve got decline in keyword performance. You could do the same thing for your Google ads data.

If you wanted, you could create a similar sort of thing that looks at increases or decreases in clicks or conversions or click through rate. So, you can use Google Search Console for keyword data and site performance. For Google Analytics, that will give you more information from what happens actually once people have left the search engine results page and got to your website.

Looker Studio also will pull in more queries than what you will get out of Search Console. So, if you’re looking through Search Console and you’re looking for all the different keywords that your website is ranked for, it will only give you the top thousand. If you pull that data into Looker Studio, it’ll give you all of the ones it has available to it. And sometimes that difference can be huge. You can see where websites where we’ve got like 10, 000 keywords that are actually coming in, but you can’t view them all in search console. You have to view them in Looker Studio. You can also track keyword performance over time.

So, we like to do this with heat maps. Because I think it’s more visual. I think it’s much easier. And it’s certainly much easier than finding this information in Search Console. So, we have the query down the side.

This is from my little blog that I write. About my digital nomad life, if anybody’s interested. That’s why these are all related to various different destinations. And we’re looking at the average position and impressions by month. Again, this would extend out sort of six months, 12 months, however long you want to look at it for and we can see immediately where we’ve got increasing impressions, declining average positions, et cetera.

So, we know what to work on from an SEO perspective or what’s going really well from an SEO perspective as well. Another really cool thing that we can do is what I call index performance reporting. Again, I’ve seen this called a few different things. We can use SQL and RegEx to bucket our performance for our various different URLs on our website into, I put five categories of performing, good, fair, weak, potential, and dead.

What I’m really looking for here, is how much dead content is on somebody’s website. How many pages have they got on their website that have not really had any impressions and have had no clicks in the last three months, the last six months. Obviously, we know this causes things like index bloat and also, why are people pumping out more and more and more content when half the content on the website isn’t doing anything?

If we can highlight the content that’s not doing anything, we can go back to stakeholders or whoever marketing managers and say, we need to start deleting some of this or at least looking at rewriting some of it. The other thing we like to do is split branded versus non branded. So again, we’re looking at average position, impressions, clicks from branded terms versus non branded terms.

This is really useful. The number of times people say, oh, my organic clicks are increasing. My organic impressions are increasing. Yes, they are great. But if it’s all from branded search and not, you’re not making any gains on your unbranded stuff. Are we Actually achieving what we want to achieve?

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing; I’m just saying you need to be aware of what your data is actually telling you. And then if you want even further insights, you can blend your Google analytics data with your GA4 data. So, you can have a list of URLs.

For example, we can look at impressions, clicks, click through rate, average position organically, and we can blend that to see organic users, organic conversions or key events, organic events, et cetera, from our GA4 data. You can also use functions. If you google list of available functions in Looker Studio, you’re going to get a whole list of different ones.

I just picked this one because it’s probably most commonly used. But you can use functions to manipulate your data a little bit. My advice with that is to just go away, find the list of functions and have a play about with it. Frankly, there are millions, well, not literally, but there’s a lot of them. We’d be here all day talking about those.

Moving on to reporting on PPC data I really like to put month over month and year over year comparisons on my reporting. I think this is really helpful, especially if you’re working in things like e commerce where conversions are going to be up through the roof over the next few weeks as we go into this kind of gifting and holiday phase.

It’s really helpful to be able to compare both month over month and year over year. I think this is also particularly important for client reporting maybe even more so than for internal use because at least then you don’t have to go back and forth via email 600 times explaining to someone that the results aren’t actually down; it’s just a seasonal trend. They can see it in the report that you’ve created.

For really basic reporting, for PPC, one of the most common things we do is just use tables, really, really simple, but it means you don’t have to sit and write them out in Google Sheets or Excel. You can just auto populate something like this, put the month or the week, however often you report.

And then any key metrics that you want from the platforms same Google Analytics as we were talking about earlier, you could do something very similar. For that and obviously really helpful for client reporting. Give them the link to the report and then hopefully they’ll stop emailing you a million times a day asking you how their ads are doing.

I’ve been trying to do that over the last few years, but I don’t know if we’re actually getting anywhere. The other thing we look for if you’re running e commerce campaigns is you can use Looker Studio to identify if you’ve got products in more than one campaign.

A lot of the reports that I’m sharing on here, I have shared publicly via my LinkedIn. So, if you want any of these, you should be able to go and get access to at least the majority of them. So, you don’t have to sit and create them yourself. You can just get access. You can change it to display your own data.

And then this will tell you how many products are in how many campaigns one certain product is in. And then you can compare the performance. This is especially important to make sure. That you’ve not got product in like four different campaigns and it’s eating budget in one of them and it’s doing really well in another, then you can take it out the one it’s eating budget in. We also use reference lines in Looker Studio.

You can add this cool little industry average, or sometimes I put a target on there as well. Again, I think particularly helpful for client reporting, maybe not so useful for internal reporting. It depends how you are doing your internal reporting. But yeah, we like to put industry average also helps clients again, because I think then at least they can see actually, you know, we are above or below where we, where we really should be.

Again, might stop some emails coming through around reporting time for you. So, we are also similar to what we’re doing with keywords, we can track campaign performance over time, also using heat maps. So, for this one, for example, you can do this with campaigns, ad groups, products, anything. This one looking at products.

We’re looking at ROAS versus cost over time. So, we can see immediately if we’ve got a product that’s fallen off the edge of a cliff. Or another product that’s on the up. Maybe it’s becoming really popular. It’s something we want to extract out. Put it in its own campaign. Put it in its own Performance Max campaign.

And we’ll be able to see really, really quickly. How results are doing. I really like these. These are by technicality pivot table heat maps. So, if you’re playing about and look a studio, that’s the which call it the table type that you want to be looking out for to get this kind of stuff.

And then lastly, reporting on social media data. I need to check. I’m not going to run over my time. I’m not. So, you’ve got loads of available connectors, organic and paid pretty much for every social media platform you could want. Again, these are not native integrations for Looker. You will need a third-party provider.

Personally, would recommend looking at Reporting Ninja. I think it’s the cheapest. I think it’s one of the most reliable. That’s not to say there aren’t others. Windsor AI is another good one. Porter Metrics another good one. Supermetrics’ probably the most common. Or the biggest one is also one of the most expensive ones.

So, if you’re looking for something that’s going to do the same thing, but on a slightly cheaper price, check out some of those alternatives I mentioned.

I think I might’ve put, I’ve already mentioned this, but if you are super tech savvy, you can look at creating your own API. It will be costly if you don’t know what you’re doing though. If you have to get a developer in to do that for you, they’re probably going to charge you an arm and a leg for it. So, it might not be worth it. If you can do it yourself. Great. Good for you.

So, you can track again, similar metrics to what we track for PPC really impressions, reach, click through rate, engagement, ROAS, cost conversions, anything you want.

Most, if not all of the metrics that are available in the ads and organic platforms are also available in PPC. Looker Studio via those connectors, but you can also do some stuff to like to create your own ones. We’ve done work before with LinkedIn where we’ve looked at impressions per person when we’re looking at company pages.

So, if a company has a hundred employees, we’ll look at how many impressions per employee they get on average, and that can give us a benchmark across the industry. If we look at enough accounts.

You can use SQL and regex to book it posts. So, we use this, this looks a lot fancier than it actually is. What this does is in the legal sector, but you can do this for anything. If the post contains the word employment or employment law or harassment, then the post goes into the employment law book it. If the post contains the word award or awards, then it goes into the awards book it. You get the idea.

What this allows us to do is put posts into certain buckets so we can see, okay, when we post an event or an award, we get loads more engagement than when we post about employment law. When we post about corporate law, we tend to get more likes than what we get on average than when we post about, I don’t know, careers or something. I don’t know what people really care about, but you get the idea.

You can do a monthly overview again to track similar to what we do for Google Ads. So, this looks at like meta-ads data, but again, clicks, link clicks, impressions, etc. Really handy for client reporting. And then campaign name filters, you can filter based on your naming conventions.

So, if you have, if you use traffic as a name in your campaigns, you can do this for Google ads, you can do this for social ads. If you use engagement as a name in your campaigns, you can filter based on that. So, you can view all traffic campaigns versus all engagement campaigns for a certain metric, for example.

So, to wrap up the biggest takeaway I think I want you to get from this is Go into Looker Studio, if you’re interested, and have a play around with it. All it’s doing is pulling data from all your third-party sources and letting you visualize it. You can’t break anything in there. You can’t F anything up, right?

You’re not going to go in there, start pulling through your event data from Google Analytics, and suddenly your event data’s going to stop working. It’s not going to happen. So, you can literally do anything, go in with a goal in mind, say, okay, I want to create a report with all my KPIs on for my SEO data, for example, go in with that in mind, have a vision of what you want it to look like, and then just try to create it.

You’re not going to break anything. You can also use it for other things. I don’t know if my accountant is happy with me for this, but I do use it to track all my business accounts. It might hate it. It might be like, why, why have you not put it in QuickBooks? And I’m like, I don’t know how to use QuickBooks. But I do know how to use Looker Studio. So, all my business finance in Looker Studio as well.

Like I just said, experiment, experiment with different connectors and data sources set up your first dashboard and just, you can change and and iterate it as you go. You again, really just can’t mess anything up.

Just try, just really try and build something of use and take it from there. And then you can explore more advanced features when you’re ready. You don’t have to do all that fancy stuff straight away. Just start with the basics.

That’s everything from me. Thank you for listening. And if you’ve got any questions or anything, do feel free to message me on LinkedIn. And I’ll get back to you there. Thank you!