There’s been lots of exciting new features added for Data Studio in the past few days! One of the new features launched for Data Studio include a Hierarchy feature.

Many of them have been launched at the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco.

🔴New #DataStudio Undocumented features rolling out from @googleanalytics from #GoogleNext19 Here is a quick video of the new Drill Down feature using a bar chart. Turn on header at bottom of style tab. Switch Hierarchy on. Also sorting available on bottom of data tab. #dataviz pic.twitter.com/YC9k7PfBG6

— Lee Hurst (@Helpfullee) April 10, 2019

This function allows you to Drill Down or Drill Up into various dimensions. Up until now, Data Studio’s geo-map features had been somewhat limited in terms of what they could do.

#GoogleDataStudio new feature
Dimensions hierarchy available for most of charts
Elevate chart control and simple data exploration with drill down/up feature through a custom hierarchy of dimensions.#gifanalytics #dataviz @googleanalytics pic.twitter.com/OqzOk1rOEQ

— Mehdi Oudjida (@wissi_analytics) April 11, 2019

This latest features promises to make the geo-map function much more usable and sophisticated.

Using the new Hierarchy feature to Drill Down into Geo-Maps

In this blog post, I’ll give a practical example of how to use the new Hierarchy function for geo-maps.

Let’s say we want to take a closer look at which provinces and cities our users from South Africa are living in.

First we need to open the Data tab for our geo-map.

Then we need to turn on Hierarchy, and then choosing Country > Region > Town/City as our order.

Another new tool for Data Studio is the Chart Header feature.

Next, go to the Style tab for your geo map look for the ‘Chart Header’ document and select “Always show”.

Then we can left click to select only South Africa.

We can then click the down arrow on the Chart header to drill down into our selected country.

Alternatively, we can also right click on South Africa and select Drill Down.

As a result of clicking Drill Down, it shows us a regional map of South Africa, showing which provinces our users are from.

Next, if we want to see exactly what cities are users are from, we can click the Drill Down arrow again and take a closer look at the data.

Finally, this gives us a map of cities in South Africa, and we can see that most our users are coming from Cape Town.

To return to our world map view, we can simply click the arrow in the top left hand corner of the chart header to return to our default view.

Below is the data studio report for you to play around with and test out the hierarchy function.

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