In this post I’ll just show two methods for mapping Google Analytics city data in Google Data Studio.

Recently Data Studio added Filled Area Google Maps which allow you to view city data by area instead of bubbles.

For example here is what Miami and the surrounding suburbs look like when visualizing data using Bubbles.

And here is what Miami looks like when visualized using filled areas. We get a better sense of scale and how big each suburb is.

Below is Sao Paulo. On the left it is visualized using bubbles. When you see the large bubble in the centre of the city you might assume that there are many users living in the downtown core. But if we look at the actual area as defined by Google Maps we see that what is termed ‘Sao Paulo’ actually covers a large area and extends far south.

Likewise if we look at the map of Montreal on the left we may also assume that most Users live in downtown Montreal. Whereas if we view the city as a filled are map we see that the label ‘Montreal’ covers most of Montreal island.

Using Bubbles to view Cities does have an advantage when looking at a large region or country, while filled areas become less useful.

For example here are Users across Australia in the image below. We can instantly see that Toronto has a lot of users.

When we look at the map with filled areas and it is difficult to see any useful trends from so far way.

Differences in how many data points you can display in Bubbles vs Filled Area Google Maps

So the big difference between Bubble and Filled Area Google Maps in Data Studio is that they have the following limitations;

• Filled Area = 2000 data points
• Bubbles based on Address / City = 5000
• Bubbles based on Latitude and Longitude = 10,000

Below is a filled area map based on a City geographic type. You can see that it has a limit of 2000 filled areas. In order to use one dimension that doesn’t cause issues with duplicate city names (Paris, Texas vs Paris, France for example) I use this custom field; CONCAT(Town/City,”, “,Region,”, “,Country).

If we use Bubbles with Latitude, Longitude as our Location and Town/City as our Tooltip we can have up to 10,000 data points on our map.

Below I’ve created a data studio report which you can use to take a look at the different map types.

Note that you will need to open the report in Google Data Studio itself to view the Google Maps. If you look at them in the embedded report it will say “Google Maps cannot yet be displayed in embedded reports.”.

Click on the Google Data Studio logo in the bottom right hand corner of the report to open and interact with the maps.

My Other Blog Posts

I hope you found this blog post about Mapping Google Analytics City data interesting! You might enjoy my other blog posts.