Google Data Studio trickled onto the analytics scene in mid-2016, and came out of beta late last year, but it is starting to become more heavily used by agencies and marketers alike. They’re both free to use, capable of displaying the same analytics data, and help clients to make sense of the sometimes-overwhelming amount of information around site performance, but they aren’t equal. In this article, I look at the pros and cons of displaying your analytics data in dashboards using Google Analytics and using Google Data Studio.
TIME
Time is where Google Analytics is the real winner – with all the data sitting within the same interface, creating a Google Analytics dashboard is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons. There is the option of creating a blank or starter dashboard, plus a whole range of user-created templates within the Gallery. The Gallery interface itself isn’t the cleanest, and choosing a template can often create more work with adjustments than creating your own. However, if you’re looking for guidance or ideas on how to get started, the Gallery allows you to import a template and overlays your data within it.

Alternatively, creating your own dashboard is really a matter of visualising the most important information that your clients need to know, and presenting it in the clearest format possible. Each dashboard is made up of widgets, which are essentially charts and tables that display the analytics data. You add a widget, select your chart type, dimensions, metrics, and any filters, (say you want to show the most valuable channel for newsletter sign-ups – a pie chart often displays this well; the dimension would be Default Channel Groupings; the metric would be Unique Events; and the filter would be only for the Event Label equal to Newsletter Sign-Ups) – and the information is visually represented as the widget.

Google Data Studio can take a significant amount of time to set up. There are report templates within the software itself, and there are a lot more elsewhere, which can be useful for Google Analytics reports (as there’s only the one within Data Studio). There are also a range of reports for displaying other data sets – one for Google Ads, one for Search Console, one for YouTube, etc. A good idea is to create your own template with the data your own clients seem to find most useful, then adapt that for each job.
You then need to connect your Data Source to the Report, which essentially asks you to select the GA Account, Property, and View that will be shown within the report. After that, it’s a matter of selecting the appropriate dimension, metric, and filter or segment (another exciting function that GA doesn’t have – you need to apply a segment to the whole dashboard, not an individual widget). Even then though, Data Studio has so much information to filter, aggregate, blend, etc, particularly when you’re working with big (combined) data sets, that it’s simply slower than Google Analytics.
WINNER: GOOGLE ANALYTICS
AESTHETICS
The Google Analytics dashboards are not particularly inspiring. Granted, there are small adjustments you can make to the column layout, but overall, there’s no colour or theme selection, no option to add branding, no backgrounds or headers or font customisation. The available charts do make the information pop, and tables are shown with alternate row background colours, so it is clear. However, a three-column (or two, if you’ve got long dimension labels) dashboard will often squash the labels, pushing text onto the next row; you can’t add custom images or text, which could help to explain particular data or a single widget; and other limitations around number of rows or segments sometimes means you just can’t show what you want to show (e.g. all events – you can link to that report from the widget though). Essentially, though, the visual appeal of Google Data Studio reports blows the Google Analytics dashboard out of the water.

Google Data Studio allows you to completely customise the reports, from colours and fonts through to adding client logos and links. Each element has a style tab that shows the available components to adjust, with full hex colour selection, a handy array of fonts, opacity, palettes, fills, lines – you name it, you can (probably) do it. The Layout and Theme options allow a report-level style which saves time for multiple page reports. The only negative to the number of options available in Data Studio is that it can (again) take up a lot of time setting up the report with so many different components to customise.

WINNER: GOOGLE DATA STUDIO
FUNCTIONALITY
While Google Analytics dashboards are great for displaying Google Analytics information, one of the major limitations is that each dash allows only 12 widgets. If you need more than that, you need to create a new dashboard.
Google Analytics allows each widget to link back to the report that is pulling the data, which means you’re easily able to make adjustments based on whatever variables you need – for example, if the dashboard is showing conversions by channel grouping, a direct link back to that report from the widget itself will let you add a secondary dimension for source, diving deeper into the data.
The real benefit with using Google Data Studio for dashboarding is the connections it has with over 500 data sources, meaning you can import data from any of those sources and display it within the same dashboard. This makes it a fantastic option for anyone looking to visualise their Analytics data along with their social media data, for example, or Mailchimp data, or essentially any other data that can go into a CSV file. You can also blend data from two different sources, which opens up a whole range of possibilities.
Using Data Studio’s calculated fields allows you to create custom fields in addition to the standard dimensions and metrics that Google Analytics passes through, so if you want to do some basic maths on data (e.g. to get a conversion rate for your newsletter sign-ups event (users/unique events) or get a total for two particular goals, it’s a fantastic resource. There are trillions of rows of information on calculated fields, but start with Google.
Google Data Studio also allows for multiple pages within the one report, meaning the first page can be a high-level overview, and subsequent pages can delve deeper into the information most valuable to your clients.
WINNER: GOOGLE DATA STUDIO
SHARING
Google Analytics dashboards are able to be shared with any other users who have access to that View, which will leave you with both a Shared and Private version of the same dash. While this is useful in that other users can make changes to the shared dashboard (there’s no ‘read-only’ access) so yours can stay pristine, in practical terms it means making the same changes twice over, or accidentally making requested adjustments to only the private version rather than the shared.
Google Analytics’ email feature within Dashboards also makes scheduling dashboard sends very easy – the feature displays a dialog box with fields for email addresses, notes, and a frequency drop-down, as well as an advanced option on the length of time the scheduled email will continue. That being said, the export as PDF option produces a slightly clunky, not-especially-nicely-formatted print-out.
Google Data Studio reports make sharing straightforward, and allow multiple options for editing or viewing of either the report with the data included (default), or requesting a log-in to access the data set. The simplest way is to get a sharable link, or email the user. One caveat to this is that you cannot transfer ownership of a report to a client in full – they’ll need to copy the report and connect up the data sources themselves. You can’t transfer ownership of a dashboard within Google Analytics either, but then you don’t need to – once a dashboard is shared, anyone with access to the View can see it, and it doesn’t say who created it.
Data Studio has previously been lacking in the “scheduled send” department – up until last month, the only way users could view the report was to visit Data Studio itself. It refreshes the data on load, so users were seeing the most up to date information, but sometimes clients need to be reminded to look at their site performance, and the onus was then on the analyst to send reminder emails. Data Studio also lacked a proper print option, so onscreen was the only available possibility.
Now, though, Data Studio has a PDF download option (with password protection as required), as well as a scheduled email delivery option (with PDF and preview with link), so it’s hitting all the right spots.

WINNER: GOOGLE DATA STUDIO
CONCLUSION
While it’s clear that Google Data Studio comes out ahead on aesthetics, functionality, ease of sharing, the set-up time makes Google Analytics the first choice for GA-only dashboards, particularly if they’re for internal use.
If you’re looking to share a report with other stakeholders, and aesthetics like company branding are important, then putting the time into creating a Google Data Studio report is definitely worthwhile.