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

• Google Tag Manager ~ This tool you can use to collect information and write it to Google Analytics
• Connectors ~ which you connect directly too, like Supermetrics or Power My Analytics
  • Payment Platforms
  • Ads Platforms
  • Cart Systems
• CRM
• Weather Information

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.

1. User Actions – What did they do
2. Users Vision – Where were they when they did the thing?
3. User’s Journey State – Think “Traditional Marketing” buyer journey
   1. Solicited ~ You asked a question & they answered it.
   2. Unsolicited ~ Where you expect a user to be at this point in the journey.
4. Platform Information – Usually standardized, like Facebook Ad spend or Stripe schemas
5. 3rd Party Information – Weather, Demographic, Psychographics

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:

• What does “Work” mean?
• We were not tracking video views previously.
• How do we even report on this consistently?

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

• Opens – How many times was this email opened?
  • By: Open Email Name
• Clicks – How many times was this link clicked on?
  • By: Click URLs
• Forwards – How many times was this email forwarded on?
  • By: Forward Email Name

Website Interactions

• Clicks – What did they click on?
  • By: CSS ID, URL, Text,
• Scrolls – Where are they scrolling to?
  • By: Page Height,
• Timers – How long did the spend on X?
  • By: Timer Length

Facebook Ads

• Impressions
  • By: Campaign, Adsets, Audiences, Ads
• Interactions
  • By: Type of interaction, Ad Name
• Clicks
  • By: Ad, Link Location
• Comments
  • By: Comment type, Name

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

1. Do you need the URL the clicked?
2. CSS Class they clicked?
3. Text they clicked on?

Food for thought

Type 2: User Vision – What A User Is Experience

This is circling back to the original question at the top.

• “Does the product page have a video?”
• “Do product pages with video perform better without a video?”

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

1. Impression – Viewed Page
2. Aware – Enough time to understand
3. Engage – Engaged with the content
4. Investigate – Investigating one of the offers.
5. Initiate – Taking the final steps
6. Convert – Success

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:

1. Census information on US City Population
2. Weather from the National Weather Service
3. Any Government information from Data.Gov

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!