In this post I’ll show you how to make some charts from a long term Search Console report in Google Data studio.

This report takes data from Google Search Console and displays in ways that might be tricky, or take some time to set up in Search Console.

I’ll be explaining two charts from this report.

A time series chart showing impressions and clicks by month

To start things off, let’s create the time series chart. We want to show impressions and clicks over time.

To do that we create a Time Series chart with the following setup;
Dimension = Date
Metrics = Impressions, Clicks

We then need to click on Date and choose it to “Show As” Year Month. This will give us a compact report showing the number of impressions and clicks for each month.

In order to make sure that we can clearly see each metric, I’ve decided to make one series a bar and the other a line.

So in this case we will make impressions a bar and clicks a line on our time series chart. Make sure to have the impressions on the left axis and the clicks on the right axis.

We should then have our chart showing the number of impressions and clicks for each month.

A table showing impressions and clicks by month

The second interesting chart is the table.

This shows the number of impressions and clicks, but it also shows them as a percentage of the highest monthly value.

At the time I wrote this blog post, it was a few days into September 2019. So in the chart below we can see that so far August was the month with the highest number of impressions and clicks.

Therefore as the column “% of highest month” for impressions and clicks shows August as 100%. Other months in the % of highest month column are shown as a percentage of August. As an example, June 2019 had 49,244 impressions which was 35% of the number of impressions August had.

To create this table, set up the data in the following way. I will explain how to create some of the metrics below.

Dimension = Date (Shown as Year Month, as explained in how to create the first time series chart in this post)

Metrics = Impressions, Impressions (% of highest month), Clicks, Clicks (% of highest month)

To create the % of highest month metric, we can simply add impressions as a metric again.

Then, as shown below, we can choose to display it as a Percentage of max relative to corresponding data from the Comparison calculation options.

Comparison calculations are a recently added feature, and open up some nice new possibilities for how to display data.

The other charts and table in this report are fairly simple, so I won’t go into them.

I hope you enjoyed this post about how to make some charts from a long term search console report in Google Data studio.

My Other Blog Posts

If you liked this article you might like my other blog posts.