Monitoring Report Usage

When you have one or more dashboards built and shared with the target audience, you may want to understand how users are engaging with and using these dashboards. After all, when you get a sense of how well the data story you've created is being received, you can then take any actions needed to increase adoption. Looker Studio allows you to monitor report usage through Google Analytics (GA). GA is a web and mobile application Analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports user traffic. This chapter will examine what tracking report usage involves and walk you through the process of leveraging GA for this purpose. You will learn about relevant GA concepts and its built-in reports for analyzing usage. Alternatively, you can leverage Looker Studio to visualize the usage metrics. Furthermore, you can analyze raw usage data in BigQuery by exporting it from GA.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

• Usage monitoring...

Technical requirements

To follow the implementation steps in this chapter, you need to have a Google account that can be used with GA and Looker Studio. It is recommended that you use Chrome, Safari, or Firefox as your browser.

Optionally, you will need access to Google BigQuery if you wish to follow the steps on exporting GA data. BigQuery Sandbox is available to anyone with a Google account. You can learn about getting access to the sandbox at https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/sandbox. This does not require a billing account and has limited capabilities. The sandbox serves the purpose of this chapter. Another option is to sign up for a 90-day free trial of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) at https://cloud.google.com/free, which offers a full breadth of capabilities and features.

Usage monitoring overview

Monitoring the usage of reports has several benefits. Knowing how various reports and dashboards are being used helps in both demonstrating your impact and prioritizing your efforts. Even if Looker Studio makes it very easy to create reports, it takes a decent amount of effort and time to build a well-thought-out and properly designed dashboard. You want to invest your efforts where the users will find the results to be most beneficial. Analyzing user traffic data and patterns also helps you identify potential usability issues. Then, you can optimize your reports appropriately to increase their utility. For example, a low engagement rate may indicate that many users do not find the dashboard very useful or find it hard to understand.

Tracking report usage enables you to get answers to questions such as the following:

• How many users are viewing the dashboards?
• How long are they spending on different dashboards?
• How often are they visiting...

Google Analytics primer

This section provides a brief overview of GA concepts and its built-in reports. If you are already familiar with GA, you can skip this section and move on to the next. GA is a web Analytics service that tracks website (and mobile application) traffic and provides tools to analyze it. It is part of the Google Marketing Platform brand and is primarily used for digital marketing and search engine optimization purposes. For instance, it helps you measure site and campaign performance, understand your customer demographics and device attributes, and so on.

GA is a user-friendly and free tool, the latest version of which is called GA 4, or GA4 for short. GA4 supersedes Universal Analytics (that is, GA3), which was introduced in 2012 and will reach end-of-life by June 2023. At the time of writing, Google Universal Analytics is still used by millions of sites and applications. Compared to the Universal Analytics version, GA4 uses a completely new data and measurement...

Monitoring Looker Studio report usage with GA4

You can monitor Looker Studio report usage by adding a GA Measurement ID to each of the reports.

Setting up GA4 for Looker Studio report monitoring

Let’s walk through the steps of setting up GA4 for Looker Studio monitoring and tagging the reports for tracking:

1. Visit https://analytics.google.com. Log into your Google account if you haven’t done so already.
2. If you haven’t used GA before, you will see the welcome screen. Clicking the Start measuring button will take you to the Account setup page. Alternatively, if you have used GA before, you can create a new account from the Admin page.
3. Provide the following details:
   1. Account name
   2. Property name
   3. Optionally, account data sharing settings and business information
4. Click Create and accept the terms of service and data protection terms.
5. Next, you will see the ADMIN page, where you can set up a data stream to collect the data:

...

Exporting GA4 data to BigQuery

Exporting GA4 data to BigQuery, Google’s cloud data warehouse, helps you analyze large volumes of data and perform complex data transformations and queries efficiently. While it may seem like overkill for Looker Studio report usage monitoring, especially at smaller data volumes, exporting raw Analytics data to BigQuery provides benefits such as the following:

• Combining Analytics data with other sources of data easily, either within BigQuery itself or by exporting it to other systems from BigQuery as needed
• Querying and reporting on complete data without any sampling involved
• Manipulating data in ways not easily possible with GA and Looker Studio
• Performing historical analysis beyond the GA limit of 14 months
• Access to more granular data (session-level, event-level, user-level) and additional attributes (for example, geographical hierarchy).

Follow these steps to export GA4 data to BigQuery:

1. From the GA4 ADMIN...

Summary

Monitoring report usage activity is a good way to measure the effectiveness and usefulness of reports. In this chapter, you learned how to monitor Looker Studio reports using Google’s web Analytics service, GA. You examined the steps of setting up GA4, the latest version of the service, to track user activity. You also explored the various built-in reports within GA4 and learned how to create custom reports. Visualizing the usage data in Looker Studio allows you to limit the information presented, as well as depict it in more flexible ways than possible within GA4. By doing so, you understood how you can export raw event data to BigQuery so that you can perform advanced and complex analyses on granular and unsampled data.

This was the final chapter of this book. I hope this book helped you learn how to use Looker Studio to build compelling dashboards through a step-by-step approach. I hope it also provided you with foundational knowledge about data storytelling and...