
Google Data Studio - wiradikusuma
https://datastudio.google.com
======
chipperyman573
For anyone wondering what this is:

"Google Data Studio (beta) turns your data into informative dashboards and
reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Start
telling great stories with your data and make better business decisions.

Create up to five free custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing with
Data Studio."

(From [https://www.google.com/analytics/data-
studio/](https://www.google.com/analytics/data-studio/))

This also isn't anything new, it was released a few months ago:
[https://analytics.googleblog.com/2016/05/announcing-data-
stu...](https://analytics.googleblog.com/2016/05/announcing-data-studio-our-
free-new.html)

~~~
myowncrapulence
So.. it's google analytics? Or a client for analytics? I still don't
understand.

Why wouldn't this just be integrated into their existing platform?

~~~
golfer
Somewhat like Tableau, but in the cloud.

(Tableau may have a cloud version too, I'm actually not sure)

~~~
tixocloud
Yep, Tableau does have a cloud version too - both private and hosted.

~~~
djd20
Also worth checking out is [http://redash.io](http://redash.io) for this kind
of stuff - fairly new but developing quickly and very easy to hack on/add
stuff. Good docs, easy to deploy and has some nice auto-update reports bits.
We use that quite heavily. Its open source/free to use but also comes with
paid cloudy plans.

~~~
arikfr
Thanks for mentioning Redash! (I'm the author) It's actually not that new --
I've been working on it for 3 years now :-)

------
soared
This is almost my favorite tool, barring a couple problems. Its very easy to
use, and makes very readable, pretty reports/dashboards. Sharing via a URL is
nice, but I really like just exporting as a PDF and emailing them. Here is an
example report that took <10 minutes to make [1]. The big problems though:

1\. Beta version. You can't use this in production, send reports to clients,
etc. when this tool is in beta. A client gets this report and expects all
future reports to be this pretty, but Google might just kill it off or it
could break.

2\. Limited to 5 reports. The majority of agencies/brands can't afford the
$100k+ a year for premium G suite. 5 reports per account kind of sucks, and
I've had to use old google accounts to get past that limit.

3\. Design. Most people simple aren't good at design, so you need a designer
to create a good number of templates. Users cannot stray away from templates
unless they know what they are doing. While its easy to use, its easy to make
things look bad too.

4\. You can pull from a Google Sheets, but updating that sheets doesn't play
nicely with data studio.

Side ux notes.. changing pages resets the date range which is annoying.
Choosing custom colors for some charts doesn't always work.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/1SCUNu1.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/1SCUNu1.jpg)

~~~
rffn
How does updating sheets used as data source not play nicely with dat studio?
I would expect the report to update when the sheet changes, at least when the
report is reloaded. Is this what is happening?

~~~
dudus
Right now, because of caching the update can take up to 12h. But you can
manually update the data source to bring the latests data from the
spreadsheet.

~~~
rffn
Thanks for the heads-up. That would indeed cause an interesting confusion if
not known to the users. We could probably live with it for some use cases, a
more direct update would be better though.

------
nevi-me
Tried using it yesterday, but says it's not available in my country (South
Africa). I'm tired of silly restrictions like this, it immediately turned me
off Data Studio.

I have a Tableau licence at work, which we feel are expensive and restrictive
in terms of transferring licenses around when no longer needed.

Seems like a no disappointment option these days is to just invest in the d3
ecosystem as much as possible.

~~~
brazzledazzle
It could be as simple as them testing the waters or as complex as data storage
and analysis having different requirements per country. It is annoying but may
be the best they can do.

~~~
tajen
Google could have spread the Beta using an _invitation-only scheme_ (Remember
Gmail? That's how they controlled the load). Exclusive invitations are more
inclusive than a US-centric approach. Customers get fed-up with US-centric
approaches, which give us:

\- Different content on Netflix (Many movies in US, less than 1/4 in Poland),

\- Different treatment as civilians (See: NSA spying, Predators)

\- Movies coming 6 months later in Europe.

I get it that US customers have more money, but if companies could use a
specific criteria like "high-return customers" rather than a prejudice like
"Only Silicon Valley customers will understand", that would be nice.

~~~
brazzledazzle
But if we assume the issue is a legal one and they need lawyers specializing
in each country's laws to vet it for every country they release it in
releasing a preview per-country makes sense.

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laacz
It's getting too common for new tools from large companies (Google, Facebook,
Twitter, Apple) to be unavailable in most smaller markets. For example, Data
studio told me that "Data Studio is not available in your country.". Yet, I
can play with pre-existing reports.

~~~
harryf
Drives me wild also. I assume it's because i18n / l10n takes time / money so
it's easier to start with English speakers only, rather than something about
controlling access to intellectual property or some form of digital
colonialism.

Where iPhone / Android app stores are concerned, I can understand a bit with
not launching an app in a country until it's really ready to go, otherwise you
just attract negative reviews.

But in this case I can't see a good reason for not allowing an English-only
version in all countries.

~~~
hrktb
> Where iPhone / Android app stores are concerned, I can understand a bit with
> not launching an app in a country until it's really ready to go, otherwise
> you just attract negative reviews.

As a side note, as the stores are purely virtual, it becomes very easy to use
a store outside of the country you live in. For instance I kept using the same
store after moving country, or I know people using the US stores for various
reasons while staying outside of the US.

I am actually wondering how niche of case this could be, but this makes weird
cases where you're bound to switch back and forth between multiple stores just
to get a single app that didn't want to get published in all the countries.

In particular bank apps do that a lot, when they're already checking for
account numbers etc. so they could as well publish in every country and still
only allow their members to use the app.

------
thomaspryor
We're using this a lot at Khan Academy already. Nothing that other products
can't do, but the ease of use, familiar interface, and google account
integration have made use of it spread through the company very quickly

~~~
BucketSort
That's awesome. May I ask what tool Data Studio replaced for you?

------
titel
"Data Studio is not available in your country."

Why is this still a thing any more? Even more this is a product of a single
company so no legacy licensing scheme (like for movies for instance) can be
blamed :(

~~~
rcarmo
I'm in Portugal and can see it just fine. Where are you accessing from?

~~~
rcarmo
Belay that, I just tried to create a report and yes, it says the same to me.
No clue if it's a matter of data sovereignty, privacy, legal, technical, or
billing, and the usual non-information from Google.

------
sandGorgon
MySQL support exists,but no postgres?

I notice that Google has consistently built support for MySQL in all its
products...but never postgres.

I don't understand why - is there a massive amount of engineering involved ?

~~~
mrmondo
Why you'd use MySQL rather than PostgreSQL in 2016 baffles me unless you're
supporting a legacy application, I feel your pain.

~~~
greyskull
One interesting case with Uber: [https://eng.uber.com/mysql-
migration/](https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/)

~~~
debaserab2
That's not that interesting to most of us. That's a huge edge case that I've
seen used as fodder in every MySQL vs Postgres argument on HN since it's come
up since that blog article was published.

------
ioda
Shameless plug : We have been building
[http://www.reportdash.com](http://www.reportdash.com) with a similar target
market. Datastudio appeared to be our startup killer in the beginning. But I
guess, we may narrowly escape owing to the usability advantage, and the deep
integration we have for datasources like adwords, fb ads etc

We are working hard to give a fight. We are about to release a major update in
the coming months which makes slicing and dicing data a breeze.

~~~
mrkmcknz
Having signed up for a trial the major downfall from your on-boarding process
is that there is no test data for me to have a play with.

I want to give you guys a chance but my initial evaluation needs to be with
some dummy data tailored to your features so you can showcase these.

~~~
ioda
Yup. Truly understand that. Shall mail you a demo account. We are still work
in progress, and many touch points are not the way we really wanted. A demo
account is up there in our priority list.

~~~
Rezo
Demo accounts are OK, but what you really want to do is avoid the empty
account syndrome after signup altogether. The user is all excited to check out
your product, but is intimidated by the blank slate state.

Instead, the first thing the user should see is a fully functioning realistic
example of your value prop, and it is critical that they can edit and mess
with it to their hearts content before they start a new project of their own.
Designing for the blank slate is a quite well known design pattern in mobile
UX, but I can tell you from experience it works wonders for SaaS conversion as
well (check profile if interested in an example).

~~~
ioda
Fully agree. I started working on it!

------
JungleGymSam
An alternate from Microsoft is Power Bi. Much more mature.
[https://www.powerbi.com](https://www.powerbi.com)

~~~
vetinari
It's also Windows-only.

~~~
benbristow
Not the cloud version. To be honest though what business isn't using Windows?

~~~
vetinari
Many SOHOs, some SMBs and Google. Enterprises do run Windows, but then, since
when they were known for being bleeding edge?

~~~
zp-j
Have you heard Office365?

~~~
vetinari
Yes, I've heard about it. And you would be surprised, how often the answer to
putting your company data on other's people computers is: No.

~~~
laurentb
good thing it's the same here for Google data studio...

powerBI cloud has a free tier and does not require a subscription to try
afaik: [https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-
us/pricing/](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/)

in either case, you can work with spreadsheets stored on your computer, but in
any case just like Google, you'd have to upload it to work with it.

the pro version doesn't tie you to O365 either even though it uses the same
platform

------
lpasselin
We use this for a client with Google adwords data. User can go to a url and
see data and plots we selected for him. Decent tool, easy to use but a bit
slow when I used it last month.

------
david90
I used to sync Google analytics and other external data source to Google
Spreadsheet with addons([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-
analytics/f...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-
analytics/fefimfimnhjjkomigakinmjileehfopp)) and visualize the data

Just played around datastudio, customization seems easier.

------
gegtik
Wonder how related this is to Fusion Tables

[https://fusiontables.google.com/](https://fusiontables.google.com/)

~~~
BucketSort
Data Studio is much more focused on creating data analytics dashboards. It
looks like a very visual centric tool. Thanks for the link to fusion though. I
haven't heard of it. Kinda out of the googlsphere.

------
mikeflynn
I've been staring at the MySQL connection settings deciding if I want to
actually want to connect this with or not for about five minutes.

------
bsg75
Its surprising and disappointing that as a Google product you have to contact
a sales rep for pricing.

For a company like Google, who is known to make contact with actual support
people difficult, making pricing of all things a sales interaction is off-
putting.

~~~
blahi
Pricing is around $15/user. 200 users minimum. Yeah, your read that right.

~~~
bsg75
Did you find that on the Data Studio site? If so, share the link?

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wgx
We (at D4) have been offering something similar - QueryTree lets users connect
a data source (MySQL, MS SQL, AWS or PostgreSQL) and then build powerful
reports and visualisations with no technical knowledge required. We even
suggest JOINs that make sense automatically.
[http://querytreeapp.com/](http://querytreeapp.com/)

I'd be really interested in feedback from people who like/dislike the Google
Data Studio product.

------
djhworld
This is nice, from the looks of it you can query datasources in the Google
Cloud ecosystem like BigQuery etc, although it doesn't appear to support
joining across datasources (could be wrong)

This would probably be very useful for 'ad-hoc' queries/reports. I don't
believe AWS offers anything similar right now, outside of spinning up an EMR
cluster and attaching a notebook or something - but that's a lot of setup

~~~
dgudkov
>I don't believe AWS offers anything similar right now

I guess Amazon QuickSight [1] is similar to Google Data Studio.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/](https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/)

------
sosha
Data Studio is not available in your country.

Would you like to be notified when the service is available?

Sigh...

------
user5994461
Let's get straight to the point.

How does it compare against ChartIO (SaaS)?
[https://vimeo.com/149352971](https://vimeo.com/149352971)

And how does it compare against Looker (self hosted)?
[https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/looker-analytics-
platform-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/looker-analytics-platform-
scores-48-million-led-by-kleiner-perkins/)

By the way. Those two are the main players if you want state of the art data
visualization ;)

------
1_listerine_pls
I think tools like this are going to enable more government accountability.
Facilitating visualization and sharing of what otherwise would be a bunch of
numbers is key.

In Mexico there is only one electric utility company. The price per kWh is
supposed to be a function of the median monthly temperature. However, many
cities are misclassified on purpose. A map showing which cities are
misclassified would be really easy to do and share if it supported maps.

~~~
pabloarteel
Hey, this sounds interesting. Are you up to do this? I'd like to help.

Shoot me an email to pablo (at) rocketjourney.com to discuss it further!

~~~
1_listerine_pls
I'm gathering the data from the official sites, so I'll probably send it
tomorrow.

------
jasonhoyt
A nicer alternative for non-US folks, or even those in the US, would be
DataHero ([https://datahero.com/](https://datahero.com/)). Less feature rich
than Tableau, but also extremely easy to use with practical graphs and data
mashups out of the box.

I have no connection to the app, other than I've tried dozens like it,
including Google's Data Studio.

~~~
Flemlord
We use Klipfolio. Very nice, many chart types with many many more connectors.

~~~
infinite8s
I always see this as a bullet point discounting other more advanced tools. How
many chart types exactly do you need? As far as I can tell, most analyses that
anyone needs to do on tabular data (so ignoring graph like analytics) requires
maybe 6 different chart types (bar charts, line charts, scatter plots,
heatmaps). Those cover basically every possible combination of numeric and
categorical data axes (including color and size of elements).

------
palmeida
I invite you all to visit and test Viur
([https://www.viurdata.com](https://www.viurdata.com)) to build your
reporting. We offer unlimited connections to the most commonly used database
engines and also google analytics. You can build your dashboards using drag &
drop or write SQL. Disclaimer: I am one of the co-founders.

------
alexrbarlow
Looks really nice, often having business wide dashboard are a pain and it's
nice for everyone to be able to see sign ups etc. MySQL data source is good
but I'm hoping they'll include things like prometheus or others later. For now
this would work with some Segment.io or similar batch jobs

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ben_jones
I wonder if this will be able to extend the Google cloud console / analytics.

And it's nit-picky but some of the dashboards aren't responsive in chrome,
which I would normally let go but if you're gonna force us into the cult of
material design you might as well get that right.

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ljw1001
Is there any information on building connectors to new data sources? I can't
find any on the site.

------
aaronhoffman
A site we've been working on for a while that does something similar, but with
d3.js and dc.js to bring the charts to life:
[https://www.sizzleanalytics.com](https://www.sizzleanalytics.com)

~~~
postscapes1
When are you offering a paid version? Love your tool but really want to have
an embed function

------
gabrielrdz
Why waste any time using it if a few years down the line they will discontinue
it?

~~~
pgodzin
Feels old seeing this on every single thread about a Google product. This
isn't something you need to retool your company around and end up screwed if
it's canceled. It's a nice analytics dashboard that either provides value for
you for however long you decide to use it, or if it has no value to you then
you just won't use it.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Yes. But why even bother if the company offering the product is known to
abandon its customers? Why not find and trust a trustable brand? Unless
there's something exceptional about this product. First time shame on you.
Second, third and fourth time... shame on me.

~~~
Klathmon
Every company sunsets old products. Do you feel the same when Windows
discontinued XP? When apple dropped support for safari on windows? When your
favorite startup tool just closed up shop one day without much of any notice?

At least when google sunsets a tool, they almost always give a year+ of
notice, the often provide alternatives, the always allow full data export, and
they have been known to extend support for a product if there is a lot of
pushback.

------
cpsempek
Their colors are off in the AdWords example dashboard. The donut charts in the
bottom right, yellow is mobile phones in the chart, but the mobile phone icon
is blue. The other chart-icon colors are similarly off.

------
awestroke
No drill-down, only explore the time axis. Worthless for any real BI

~~~
butler14
It's not for 'drill-down', it's for dashboards and data viz.

------
rabboRubble
Anybody have decent test data connections that can be used to play with this?
Unfortunately my personal Google account is sparse and doesn't provide much
meat on the bone.

------
tsumnia
Has anyone gotten YouTube Analytics to work? My authorization did nothing, and
sadly that's what I'd like to generate!

Edit: Nevermind, I left the page, came back and things worked(?)

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johnhenry
I've been using silk.co for a while now. It seems quite similar in it's use
case... I wonder if anyone might be able to comment on the differences?

------
hd4
Just curious, are any people in this thread already using Eclipse BIRT, Jasper
Reports or Pentaho? Would you mind sharing your experiences/use-cases?

------
dgelks
Can definitely see this becoming useful as a potential metabase replacement
since we are using mysql - lack of postgres support is a weird choice though

------
rpalsaxena
What do you think, Companies having terabytes of data may use these GA as a
main tool for their analytics ?

Upto what extent they may rely on these tools?

------
jordache
The functionality is pretty limited... For a score card widget, it seems to
only aggregate values, what about min/max/avg ??

~~~
dudus
You might want to change the aggregation type of a metric. You can also
duplicate a metric on the data source and give it a different aggregation
type.

From:
[https://support.google.com/360suite/datastudio/answer/640204...](https://support.google.com/360suite/datastudio/answer/6402048?hl=en#change_a_metrics_aggregation)

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mataug
My guess is that this was some internal tool that got cleaned up and opened to
the public as a beta.

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alexc05
Looks like they need some qa. The sample Adwords report looks really buggy on
the iPad Pro (chrome)

------
vgt
works on top of BigQuery!

------
BucketSort
Someone please spoil my optimism about this. This seems like a game changer in
reporting. What do you guys use that make this obsolete?

~~~
jebolle
Have a look at Power BI: [https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-
us/](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/)

------
xchaotic
And that is less than 2 years after they abandoned Google refine.

~~~
dudus
It was openSourced as OpenRefine.
[https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine](https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine)

------
iTunzUout
Does this make chart.io obsolete?

~~~
cyberferret
I think what will make chart.io obsolete more that this announcement is their
(chart.io's) reluctance to put any sort of pricing plans or free tier
capabilities (or even if they actually _have_ a free tier) anywhere on their
site. I get that this is the enterprise-y thing to do, but it would be a
massive turn off for the sort of audience who would be evaluating it against
DataStudio or PowerBI etc.

~~~
user5994461
ChartIO (cloud) used to be $99/month for startup, then $499 later (after they
increased the pricing). Not sure what it is now.

By comparison. Last I talked to Looker (self hosted). They asked for
$65k/year.

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andrewvijay
Looks pretty complex. I wonder how long it took them to pull it off.

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ommunist
Is this beta for US-based hosts only at the moment?

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smegel
Google Analytics 2.0

