In this blog post I’ll provide some examples of how to visualize Geographic data using Google Data Studio.

UPDATE: You can now visualize geographic data using Google Maps

Since this was written there have been some big changes to Google Data Studio. One major changed was the inclusion of Google Maps as a chart type.

You can read more about using Google Maps to visualize your Geographic Data at this link.

Visualizing Geographic Data using Google Data Studio

For this example of how to visualize Geographic data in Data Studio I’ll use a table listing the world’s tallest buildings.

Here’s an example of how the table is structured:

Rank	Building	City	Country	Height (m)	Height (ft)	Floors	Built
1	Burj Khalifa	Dubai	United Arab Emirates	828	2,717	163	2010
2	Shanghai Tower	Shanghai	China	632	2,073	128	2015
3	Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower	Mecca	Saudi Arabia	601	1,971	120	2012
4	Ping An Finance Centre	Shenzhen	China	599	1,965	115	2017
5	Lotte World Tower	Seoul	South Korea	554.5	1,819	123	2016

Now let’s see if we can visualize the data in Google Data Studio.

The first step is to add the data, which I’ve placed in a Google Sheet.

We’ll need to make sure that the field City is listed as a Geo data type. This will allow the data to be displayed on Geo Maps in Data Studio.

When then need to confirm we are fine with having City as a ‘Town/City’ geo data type.

We now add the data to the report.

We click ‘Add to Report’ to add to Data Studio.

Creating a ‘Count’ Custom Field

But we need a count of all the different Building.

To do this we create a custom field called ‘Count’.

We click ‘Add a Field’ and then use the following formula:

COUNT_DISTINCT(Building)

This counts each individual Building name as ‘1’.

Creating Geo Maps in Google Data Studio

Once we have our Count field we can create some maps.

Click on ‘Add a chart’ and then choose a custom Geo Map.

To create the map we will use the dimension Country and the metric Count.

We now have a world map counting the number of buildings in each country.

But we’d also like to create a world map showing which cities have the most tall buildings.

So we can copy and paste the world map we already created.

We then change the dimension ‘Country’ to ‘City for the map.

We now have two different world maps. One showing the number of tall buildings in each country, while the other shows the number of tall buildings in each city.

The finished Geographic Data report in Google Data studio

Below is the finished Data Studio report, with a table listing the world’s tallest buildings.

I hope you found this blog post about how to visualize geographic data in Google Data Studio useful.

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