In this post I’ll be showing you how you can filter by email in Google Data Studio.

This is a new feature, and I’ll be giving a simple overview of it and how it works. To learn more about this feature see the official Google notes or this blog post from Wissi Analytics.

Step1: Looking at our Data Source

So let’s pretend we have a list of clients, their investment and we want only the specific clients to have access to their own information. Obviously you would never do this with sensitive information but it’s just an example.

Below we have a list of people, and some data about their investments. Crucially we also have their email addresses.

Let’s create a new Google Data Studio report using this Google Sheet as the data source.

So we’ve added our data source. Below is what it looks like.

Step 2: Adding the data to Google Data Studio

Let’s add it to our Google Data Studio report and see what it looks like. Below we see that all the different rows of the data are visible.

Let’s go back into our Data Source to setup the filter by email function. Click ‘Resource’ and then click ‘Manage added data sources’.

Step 3: Filtering by Email

Next click ‘Filter by Email’.

It’s important to note the following:

“If your data contains email addresses, you can filter this data source to show only data matching the currently signed-in user’s email address. Report viewers must consent to letting this data source access their email address.”

So even if your email is selected, you’ll only be able to view data if you’re signed into your Google account and you’ve consented to allowing the data source access to your email address.

We then get asked to choose ‘Select Email field’. In this case we have a clearly labelled field called ‘Email’ so that is the field we will use.

Once we’ve selected our Email field, click ‘Finished’ and then let’s go back to our Data Studio report.

And low and behold my information is the only one visible!

Step 4: Creating a dashboard for one person

So only my data is visible because I’ve signed in on Google.

In theory we could build a personalize dashboard that would display information only to one person.

For example creating a new column in Google Sheets with the following formula; =CONCATENATE(“Hi “,A2,”. Your investment of “,G2,” dollars has increased to “,H2,” dollars over the past “,F2,” days.”) .

That would then display a message to each person viewing the report. You can create this by simply creating a Table and removing any colours for the borders, pagination, row numbers and anything else that would identify it as a table.

Now your table displays as plain white text and will adjust depending on the email you’ve chosen to filter by.

Step 5: Sharing the report with others

You can share the report with others using a link or sending them an email with a link to the report.

When they open the report they will see the following message appear asking them to ‘Grant consent’ as the report wants to use their information to personalize what they see.

When the click to allow consent they will then see their personalized dashboard with their own unique information displayed.

My Other Blog Posts

I hope you found this blog post about how to filter by email in Google Data Studio interesting and useful! You might enjoy my previous blog posts.