In this post, I’ll be discussing how to create a social media dashboard in Google Data Studio. One of benefits of creating a dashboard in Data Studio is that it can be easily shared or embedded.

It can also be customized to include useful information to help people understand the data.

The goals of this dashboard will be to show;

1. The total Users and Events for each Social Source for the year.
2. The daily number of Users since the beginning of the year.
3. The monthly number of Users since the beginning of the year.
4. A breakdown of each Social Source.

The Social Media dashboard I created is below.

I’ll go through the steps to create this dashboard in the post below.

1. Showing the total Users and Events for each Social Source for the year.

Let’s start off by creating a bar chart to show the total Users and Events for each Social Source.

We’ll get something that looks like this below;

The first step is to create a filter to ensure we are only seeing data from the Social default Channel grouping.

Set up a filter like this;

Include > Default Channel Group > Equal to (=) > Social

Our bar chart will now look something like what you see below.

But notice that the Sources are a mess. There’s “t.co” for Twitter and multiple Facebook sources.

To fix this we will need to create a custom field.

Click Resource > Manage added data sources.

Then click Edit.

Then click Add a Field.

You will now need to create a custom filed called ‘Social Source’. Seer Interactive has some nice examples of CASE statements for Google Data Studio.

A Note on the Social Network dimension:

• A simpler and easier option is to simply choose the pre-defined Google Analytics dimension ‘Social Network‘ to appear on the chart. This will provide all the social networks that have sent users to your website.
• The downside of this option is that small and irrelevant Social Media platforms get included separately, meaning that your graph could appear crowded.
• By creating a new field, we can lump all the small, irrelevant social media platforms into ‘Others’.
• This allows us to focus on the channels that really matter.

Back to creating the custom Social Source field.

I modified the Seer Interactive Social Source CASE statement and came up with the one below;

CASE WHEN Source  IN ( "facebook" , "m.facebook.com" , "l.facebook.com" , "facebook.com" , "lm.facebook.com", "web.facebook.com" ) THEN "Facebook"
WHEN Source IN ( "l.instagram.com" , "instagram.com" , "instagram" ) THEN "Instagram"
WHEN Source IN ( "t.co" , "twitter.com" , "twitter", "Twitter" ) THEN "Twitter"
when Source IN ( "pinterest.com" , "pinterest" , "pinterest.ca" , "pinterest.co.uk" , "pinterest.fr" , "pinterest.jp" , "b.pinterest.com" , "pl.pinterest.com" , "pinterest.com.mx" , "pinterest.cl" , "id.pinterest.com" , "ru.pinterest.com" , "br.pinterest.com" , "pinterest.com.au" ) THEN "Pinterest"
WHEN Source IN ("youtube.com") THEN "Youtube"
WHEN Source IN ("linkedin.com", "lnkd.in", "linkedin" ) THEN "LinkedIn"
ELSE "Other Source"
END

We now have our Social Source which we can use instead of just Source or Social Network.

Click save and go back to your bar chart.

Change the dimension from Source to Social Source.

Our bar graph will now look like this;

The next step is to change the metric from Sessions to Users and Total Events. We want to see how many Users we attracted from each Social Source, and then how many events they completed on the site.

What we can also do is have the chart use a Double Axis, so that we can get a better idea of how many events each Social Source is getting.

Under Axes choose Double instead of Single.

We can also change the colour of the bars if we want to.

What I did in my final graph was to sort the Graph by Social Source.

This was so I could add in some Social Media Icons to the Data Studio report and the bars for each chart would remain in the same place.

I won’t go into the details of the steps I used to do that, but the finished product looked like the image below.

2. Seeing the daily number of Users since the beginning of the year

Creating this part was relatively simple.

Just create a Time Series chart, and choose the breakdown dimension to be Social Source. I also chose Users as the metric.

We then get a simple but effective Time Series chart, as seen below.

3. Seeing the monthly number of Users since the beginning of the year

I then created a bar chart showing the number of users for each channel per month. I give an explanation of how to set this up in a previous blog post.

You can create a bar chart, and set it up as shown below.

Note that it’s important to select ‘Month of Year’ and not ‘Month of the Year’. Also make sure that Social Source is the first Dimension and Month of Year is the second dimension.

Your graph should look something like this;

4. Seeing a breakdown of each Social Source

For the fourth and final part of the Data Studio I created a table.

I set it the Data tab up as shown below.

For the Style tab of the table I added a heatmap style to each of the columns.

I also disabled Pagination, added a summary row, and removed row numbers. Your table should look something like this.

I hope you found this post about how to build a Social Media dashboard using Google Data Studio useful!

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