Make a Compact Data Studio Report using Optional Metrics and Drill Downs

Recently Google Data Studio introduced Optional Metrics. These allow you to pick and choose what metrics to display on each chart.

Optional Metrics means you can easily switch between different metrics in a chart. For example you could compare Users with Sessions. You can also switch between Users and Bounce Rate.

In practical terms this means that while previously if you had wanted to show Bounce Rate, Avg Time on Page and Sessions over the past month you might have needed to have three separate tables. Now, you can have just one table – with several optional metrics.

Drill down dimensions lets us add multiple types of dimensions to a single chart or table.

Combining multiple Metrics with Drill Down dimensions gives us the option to fit a lot of data into only a few charts.

So in this Data Studio report below, you’ll see each chart has multiple dimensions and multiple metrics in them.

Optional Metrics in a Scorecard

Let’s start off by creating a scorecard with multiple metrics.

We can add Sessions as our default metric, and Users, Page Views, Bounce Rate and Avg. Time on Page as our optional metrics.

A Compact Time Series Chart

So let’s try and squeeze in some date data and metrics into a time series chart.

And this allows us to see page views, users, bounce rate, and average time on page by month, week and date.

A Table with drill downs and optional metrics

Let’s squeeze four different dimensions and five different metrics into one table.

This gives us a lot of different ways to look at a variety of data!

A Page / Page Title table with lots of data

In our final chart we are going to look at five different metrics by Page and Page Title. We had those as Dimensions and make sure ‘Drill down’ is selected.

The table allows us to see several different metrics. In the example below, you can change the dimension from Page Title to Page and then choose to look at sessions, page views, and avg. time on page from the optional metrics.

Together, Dimension drill downs and optional metrics open up a lot of possibilities for Data Studio reports.

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I’m Michael

I’m a South African digital analyst living in Toronto, Canada. I blog about digital marketing, web analytics and data visualization.

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