Drill Down into Data in Google Data Studio

30 August 2019

In this post I’ll give some examples of how you can drill down into data using Google Data Studio. This means you can examine multiple dimensions in one chart, meaning you can have more interactive tables and charts in your reports!

I’ll show you some examples of how to use the Drill Down function in various charts and tables.

Drill Down in Time Series

The time series chart below shows a breakdown of sessions over time.

Drilling down into the information in a time series chart in Google Data Studio

You can choose to view it by date, month or year. You can set up the data tab as the following below.

Dimensions: Year, Year Month, Date
Default drill down level: Year Month
Metric: Sessions

The set up of a chart in google data studio

Drill Down in Bar Chart

The bar chart below shows a breakdown of sessions by continent, sub-continent and country.

Drill down into data in a bar chart in Google Data Studio

You can set up the data tab as the following below.

Dimensions: Continent, Sub Continent, Country, Town/City
Default drill down level: Continent
Metric: Sessions

The set up of a chart in which you can go down into data in GDS

Drill Down in Pie Chart

The bar chart below shows a breakdown of sessions by channel grouping, source, medium and source/medium. If we click only Organic Search then we can drill down into only the sources that fall under Organic Search, which in this example is 99.2% Google.

an interactive pie chart in Google Data Studio

You can set up the pie chart data tab as the following below.

Dimensions: default channel grouping, source, medium, source/medium.
Default drill down level: default channel grouping
Metric: Sessions

The set up of a chart in which you can further look into data in google data studio

Drill Down in a Table

The table below breaks down sessions into countries and cities. You can use the ‘Apply filter’ function to be able to filter it further. As shown below, if you choose to filter by only “United States” then when you drill down into cities you will only see cities in the US.