Use a Constant Value to make a Goal dashboard in Google Data Studio

So in this post I’ll show you how to create a Constant Value in Google Data Studio, and give you a practical example of how you can use a constant value to create a Goal dashboard.

So my goal is to see how many days my website gets 1000 or more page views. We are going to use the regular Google Analytics connector as our data source.

Step 1: Creating our Constant Value in Google Data Studio

So the goal is to see how many days I go over 1000 page views. I want to create a time series line chart to see on what days I go reach my goal.

To do this we create our Time Series line chart with Page Views as our only metric.

Then we click to Create a Field and type in the following = SUM(1000).

Now we have both our regular page views metric and our constant value in the line chart. We can see below a day when pageviews went over 1000 per day.

Step 2: Use Conditional Formatting show which days had more than 1000 Page Views

The next component of this dashboard is a table indicating which days had over 1000 pageviews.

So in our table we want to have the following;-

• Dimension = Date
• Metric 1 = Page views
• Metric 2 = Difference from Goal (Page Views-SUM(1000))

Date and Page Views are standard Google Analytics metrics, so we can add them to the table. We then need to create our custom ‘Difference from Goal’ metric. We calculate by using the formula ‘(Page Views-SUM(1000)’.

Next we want to add some conditional formatting to this table. I’ve decided to use the following formulas.

The end result is our Table looking like the one below. Any Date that has over one thousand page views is highlighted in light yellow, and the number in the Page Views column is highlighted in dark yellow.

The numbers in the difference from goal column are by default red, and if a specific date had over a thousand page views then it is highlighted in green.

Step 3: Add in a Page Title table and a Channel Grouping bar chart

So just to add some extra information and context to our report I’m going to add in two other charts. The first is a table showing the number of page views by Page Title and the second shows a breakdown of page views by default channel grouping.

These are both fairly simply to make so I won’t go into how they are put together. Just make sure that ‘Apply Filter’ is checked so you can click on the pages and channels in these charts and filter the other charts.

Step 4: Looking at the completed Goal dashboard in Google Data Studio

Below is the completed Dashboard showing us on how many dates we reached our goal of 1000 page views a day!

I hope you found this article useful and interesting!

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