Make a Long-term Growth Dashboard for Google Analytics Data using Data Studio

In this post I’ll show you how to make a Growth Dashboard for Google Analytics using Google Data Studio.

The Growth Dashboard

Below is the dashboard for you to take a look at.

The adaptive Goal metric in the Time Series Line chart

So I’m not going to go into detail about every chart. One aspect that I did want to show was the adaptive Goal metric in the first time series line chart.

So in a previous post I showed how you can use a simple formula to create a Constant Value for a Goal Dashboard.

What I discovered in this dashboard is that the goal automatically adjusts to the Date granularity you are looking at. So for example, I created a Goal metric equal to ‘1000’ using the formula SUM(1000).

So when we look at the number of page views by Date we see that the Daily Goal of 1000 appears as a constant yellow line, as seen in the image below.

A constant goal in a time series line chart showing the daily goal of 1000 pageviews from our google analytics data

The great part is that when we drill up to view the number of page views by Week of the Year the goal updates to a weekly goal of 7000. One thousand page views for each day of a seven day week.

Showing the weekly goal value in google data studio

We can take this a step further and drill up to show the number of page views per month. Our goal now adjusts the exact number of days in each month. Below we can see the monthly goal for February 2020, showing the 29 days of the leap year February.

Showing the monthly goal value for the number of page views from the google analytics data.

I think this is a really cool and useful feature for dynamically changing the goal value based on the Date granularity in a chart.

Adding a Trend Line to our Time Series Line Chart

So because this dashboard is focused on the growth (or lack therof) of page views over time, I’ve added in a Trend Line to the chart to see the direction of the increases or decreases in the metrics.

a time series line chart showing page views by Date and a linear Trend Line

You can easily add a Trend Line in the Style tab of your chart, as shown below.

Here is a breakdown of Trend lines from the official Google Data Studio resources:

Trendlines

A trendline is a line superimposed on a chart revealing the overall direction of the data. Data Studio supports three types of trendlines: linear, polynomial, and exponential.

  • Linear trendline: a straight line that most closely approximates the data in the chart. (To be precise, it’s the line that minimizes the sum of squared distances from every point to it.)
  • Exponential trendline: If your data is best explained by an exponential of the form eax+b, you can use an exponential trendline to show the direction of your data.
  • Polynomial trendline: this type of trend line displays data directionality as a curved line. It can be useful for analyzing large, highly variable data series.

Adding in Pivot Tables to show the number of pageview by month

So I wanted to be able to see the exact number of page views for each page over the past 365 days. So I added in heatmap Pivot Table showing the Page as the Row dimension and the Month of the Year as the Column Dimension.

heatmap Pivot Table showing the Page as the Row dimension and the Month of the Year as the Column Dimension

I hope you found this blog post about how to construct a Growth Dashboard for Google Analytics.

Download Google Data Studio Templates

If you’d like to download one of my Google Data Studio reports as a template to use for your own data, you can visit Data Studio Templates and purchase one.

Google Data Studio Templates

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