The 5 Types of Data That Need To Be Visualized: How to do it right!
Looker Studio is a question answering machine. You can slice, dice and interact with your information in almost realtime. But, with one big caveate: You need to strategize your data collection before you can get into any of the “Sexy” Looker Studio stuff. I am classifying ‘data collection’ as any raw data which you have collected: Ads Data, Surveys, Customers, Web analytics, or just your handy dandy manual entry google sheet. This “Raw Data” is called a Data Source within GDS. Data comes in two ways: (1) Standardized – Facebook ads, Shopify, Call Rail, Hrefs, or Stripe(2) Customized – Google Analytics 4, CRMs, or most all SQL databases. Examples of Data collection Methods Your Data Collection process will be the limiting factor for your Looker Studio builds. If you didn’t collect it… how are you going to report on it? There Are Only 5 Types of Marketing Data There are three types of data you need to be focused on collecting to lay your foundation. Now we are going to dive into each of these categorizations, some of which are extremely What Questions Are You Asking? Questions are like earthquakes, no one wants to think about them until you are in the middle of a big one. Then the aftermath can be devastating. Picture this, you are in the middle of a meeting with a (client or boss) and they ask. “Do our product page videos work?”…..Well shit ???? , we have 0 idea how they are working? Questions start flooding in: Let’s go through a framework together on how to collect the most actionable data at the beginning & mitigate these questions/feelings/failures together. Type 1: User Actions This is by far the most simple data to collect. This is the How a user is interacting with your intended message. I am going to give you 3 platform examples of User Interactions and we can go from there Email Marketing Website Interactions Facebook Ads This is what they are doing. If you have 15 Minutes, you can watch me set this up on our new site LookerStudio.VIP – Watch Me Set It Up In Realtime Be sure that you really know everything you are collecting. For example: With Clicks Food for thought Type 2: User Vision – What A User Is Experience This is circling back to the original question at the top. The More you think about your future questions, the better you will be able to understand what your future self will thank you for. You have to have some foresight & real vision for this! This can be as simple as saying “True/False” with if a page has a video or The number of pixels which tells you how tall a page actually is. or The color of your ad banner or The weather on the date of the outdoor ticket sale. This ‘Vision’ is where you need to have a combination of what you are trying to do in what is actually happening. Split Testing Vision This is at the heart of most split testing. 99% of split tests are run by changing what a user interacts with. Just be sure to store that split testing information in a manner that is informative. Type 3: User Journey Now we get to have some fun! Marketers love (more than Thor loves his hammer) to talk about funnels and user journeys. But we need to quantify that. You know marketers, they love to make things up. Customer Value Journey, I’s on the Journey, Customer Journey Map…. or whatever you want to call it. Personally, I like to use these stages These can be defined however you would like. You can even go off platform like to Facebook and get their impressions, etc. When you move to this type of data collections you brain really starts to shift in how you are doing things. Type 4: Platform Information Standardized information schemas are a GDS experts best friend. Many platforms which offer connectors keep their information in very specific ways. Think of Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or Google Analytics. A pageview is a pageview no matter whos Google Analytics account you are tied to. The same things goes for Ad spend within Google Ads or Facebook Ads. This is how we are able to create Templates a report using a single data source for people to use with their own account while using a connector. The platform collects all the information by default so its extremely easy to do. Platform Data is by far one of the easiest methods of collecting information. Type 5: Tangent Information There are tons of free resources on the internet you might want to reference. For example: These are EXTREMELY STANDARDIZED so you can easily blend them with your other data sources. At the same time, they are nothing special since anyone can access them. Nothing proprietary & nothing unique to you. Final Thoughts How you collect your data is by far the most special piece of your visualization journey, but at the same time its the most unsexy so try to get through it & understand the process before diving into something bigger than you thought!
