In this blog post I’m going to show you two methods for displaying year on year Google Analytics Channel data in Google Data Studio.

The Data Studio report I’ve created is below.

Method 1: How to create a Time Series Chart

The first step for both these methods is to set up our Dates to show two full years. For this example I’ve decide to show 1 January 2017 – 31 December 2018.

For the Time Series chart, click ‘Add a chart’ and then Time Series.

You’ll end up with a graph like this, showing sessions for the full two year period.

The next step is to change the Time Dimension for this chart.

You’ll want to change the Time Dimension to ‘Year’.

The next step, is to add a Breakdown Dimension. For this example we want to choose ‘Default Channel Grouping’.

Once we’ve changed our Time Dimension to ‘Year’ and our Breakdown Dimension to ‘Default Channel Grouping’ we will have a char that looks like the one below.

To change it to something better, we will need to change each Series to display as ‘Bars’ and not a ‘Line’.

Once you change the first Series to ‘Bars’ the chart will look something like what is shown below.

Once we’ve changed all the Series from Lines to Bars we will have a chart like the one below.

It’s ok, but not a great way of easily comparing the year on year change for each channel. I’ll show a different method below.

Method 2: How to create a year on year Bar Chart

To create our second Method, we’ll start by adding a Bar / Column chart.

You should have something that looks like the chart below.

The next thing to do is to change the Dimension to ‘Default Channel Grouping’.

Now our chart should look like the one below.

The next step is to add another Dimension to the chart. We will choose Year and add it.

Our Bar chart data now has two Dimensions in it, ‘Default Channel Grouping’ and ‘Year’.

We now have the number of sessions for each Channel for 2017 and 2018. This option allows us to compare the channels easier.

Adding Year as a Breakdown dimension

Below is a gif showing how to add Year as a breakdown dimension when using Google Analytics data.

Sorting by Year

We can use the secondary sort to sort the years in ascending order so that the 2019 data appears before the 2020 data.

Adding in a filter to choose specific months

One more feature we can add is a way to filter the data by month.

To do this we add a Filter control to the report.

We choose ‘Month of the year’ (not to be confused with ‘Month of Year’) and add it to our Filter Control.

For our Filter we then change the Order settings to ‘Dimension’ and ‘Ascending’.

Changing the order to ‘Dimension’ and ‘Ascending’ gives us our months in the calendar order.

We can now filter our data in the report by month, and look at year on year data for each month of the year.

Hope you found this useful!

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