The following is a cross-post of my semi-regular Analytics column, previously published on Search Engine Watch but new for readers here. You can read all my previous columns on SEW here.

Our team at Google frequently talks to web analysts, who say they spend about half their time answering basic analytics questions for other people in their organization. In fact, a report from Forrester found 57% of marketers find it difficult to give their stakeholders in different functions access to their data and insights. To help, our team launched a new feature in Analytics to help you better understand “what happened?” questions of your data, such as “how many visitors to my site from California arrived via paid search?”

But the right “why and what next” questions are not always so easy to consider, let alone answer. Posing the wrong questions wastes precious time, and with only so many hours in the day to use your data effectively you need to become really skilled at knowing what questions to ask when analyzing results so you find answers that are actionable and relevant. Let’s go through some ways you can get better at this.

1. Have the right objectives and KPIs established before your team begins executing

I’ve advised countless companies on measurement planning over the years and continue to stress the importance of this both online and at events. If you haven’t conducted measurement planning and established what your success metrics are up front, get started today. Without this, you will never ask the right questions of your data because you’ll always be boiling the analytics ocean instead of focusing on the metrics that really matter. Establishing objectives and KPIs is the best thing you can do to ensure you always ask relevant questions that lead to action that will actually get done and are aligned with your business.

2. No analysis work in a silo: know what all your different teams are doing: product, sales, marketing, etc

If you are sitting in your analyst ivory tower all day, ultimately you will ask questions you think are interesting, but perhaps not ones which have answers your team cares about, or even really impact your business. Don’t be isolated, rather spend time with your different teams so you have your finger on the pulse of their projects and goals – you will be far better positioned to help them.

3. Automate your reporting so you can spend more time asking questions of data and less time doing repeat work

Updating custom dashboards, spreadsheets, and reports manually is a time-consuming process. It’s also one no one really enjoys doing. Sure, it’s quicker to do it once, but over time, automation will save you a lot of effort, effort which is better spent asking questions of your data to tease out meaningful insights to inform your marketing. In a previous column on ClickZ I out lined some ways to get started with this critical effort.

4. Executive summaries of your dashboards shared with your team are a chance for real-time feedback to know if you are asking the right questions

As I’ve shared before, never send a dashboard without an executive summary with the main takeaways. Your summary inevitably will include insights from questions you asked of your data when reviewing the visualizations and trends. And this summary in turn will almost always generate responses from those who you have the dashboard tailored for – all too critical for us as analysts to close the feedback loop on our analysis. Don’t ignore it.

5. Don’t waste too much time on unanswerable questions, especially if they aren’t that important

We’ve all been there when a team member asks you a question about an outlier in a given month. Maybe you had a huge spike in high bounce traffic you can’t seem to find a reason for. Usually in these such cases it didn’t matter anyway other than satisfying someone’s curiosity – but you could have spent hours on end going down the rabbit hole to try and determine why something happened that might not have been that important in the first place. In my experience nearly all the “unanswerable” questions end up being ones which didn’t matter much anyway.

6. Educate your wider marketing team on the data sources your company has access to

Without knowing what it is your analysis tools are capturing you can’t meaningfully ask good questions. So as part of onboarding new team members be sure you educate them on what data sources you have access to. The other benefit on educating your team is if someone senior like your CMO asks a question beyond the scope of your current reporting capabilities, it can be a good opportunity to research how you might answer that question and potentially ask for an increased budget if required (something we all want more of).

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Before I get into why I want Google to drop everything they’re doing with Google Data Studio (GDS) – their answer to Power BI or Tableau – and prioritize my personal needs, I’ll say:

This post should read as a love letter to Data Studio because it is. It’s (incredibly) still a free tool, and I understand that comes with some limitations. Still, Portent has already used GDS to:

• Overhaul our entire agency reporting with progressive detail,
• Publish a visualization on our “Dark Traffic” study,
• Map public weather data stored in the Google Cloud, and
• Solve loads of other client-specific problems

Even so, being in Google Data Studio constantly has given me a perspective few have on its shortcomings. I’ll detail GDS growth opportunities here in the hopes that Nick and crew will take them with a grain of salt, but maybe move them up the roadmap.

Aesthetics

They’ve had many updates in the last year already on greater visual fine-tuning of charts and graphs, but for Data Studio to be the silver bullet for agency reporting it needs more ways to affect global settings across many pages.

User Themes

GDS has a few built-in themes (light and dark) that help you dictate background and font colors on entire reports, but it needs a way to store and re-use custom color palettes and fonts (including size relationships) across multiple reports.

We have a style guide at our agency with hex colors and fonts we’re expected to use in all client-facing deliverables. It would be nice to capture that style and add it to a new report with one click instead of manually adding it each time.

Data Label Control

Data Studio team has already added a way to re-size data labels on charts, which is brilliant; they were almost always too small before. I’d like to see them take this control granularity a step further. Specifically:

• Choosing where labels appear on the chart (e.g., Excel-style Inside Top, Outside End),
• Copying and pasting data label treatments from one graph to another, and
• Spacing control for labels in stacked column (or other similarly crowded) visualizations

More Fonts

Support for Adobe Typekit or even just matching the fonts available in other Google Doc programs (like Docs or Slides) would be sufficient here. Typography and readability are essential when presenting any content, but especially in data storytelling.

Arrows, Lines, Polygons and Other Shapes

Right now, only Circles and Rectangles can be drawn natively in GDS. So often, I have to screencap my beautiful visualizations in Data Studio and then annotate them with arrows and lines in other programs. Aside from just annotating data though, we’re also working on building funnel-style visualizations for clients, and they look super clunky with only rectangles.

Data

Aside from all the visual trappings, the data is still paramount, and some improvements there could take GDS from a great tool to an excellent tool overnight.

Support for Google Analytics’ Multi-Channel Funnels

Today, while the GDS connector for GA is pretty comprehensive, the inability to tell the Assisted Conversion story is brutal on our clients who rely on content marketing to drive results. I’ve long lamented Google Analytics keeping their attribution data separate from their primary data (in both the UI and API) and its absence in Data Studio hurts even more.

Better Documentation for Data Blending

Blending Data Sources is probably Google Data Studio’s most mouthwatering feature for data workers in theory. But in practice, it’s still very clunky; mostly because it lacks documented best practices and examples for things like join keys, date dimensions, filtering, and more.

The other day, I was trying to create a custom field to show the % change between two data points from disparate sources and aggregate it by week and was getting insane math out of it. It turns out deltas only work on a day-by-day basis. Would’ve been nice to know before I went down a 2-hour rabbit hole thinking I did something wrong.

Forecasting

Our most sophisticated clients want to know things like:

• How are we pacing to annual goals?
• How many conversions can I expect by the end of the month?

While I could manually enter those things in a bullet chart, one of our objectives as an analytics team this year is to automate everything we can so our content, search, and social practitioners can focus on insight and strategy.

It’s one thing to introduce a trend line, but being able to specify a regression and project anticipated performance against actuals would make GDS a killer app for not just marketing reports, but also finance.

Friendlier Error Treatments

As of my writing this, you can specify what you want to show up in a table when GDS finds a null value in a data source (either “no data,” “0,” or my personal favorite “-“). Similarly, scorecards and charts tend to break in GDS for a variety of reasons. While a glaring error message and a monkey wrench are right to see for those of us who are editing the reports, it can be jarring for clients viewing the reports. A way for us to add an “Under Construction” or “Temporarily Unavailable” message or visual to broken elements would soften the blow for viewers.

Bulk Editing for Metrics Across Scorecards and Charts

When a client decides they want to see a different metric for conversions than we’re reporting on, today I have to modify each element in the report one-by-one to make that change. It would be nice to have a global find and replace or even to highlight items that share a metric in common from the same data source and swap it out wholesale.

Thanks, Google Data Studio!

Ultimately, I’m writing all this because I care. I’m an ardent supporter of GDS and, for my money, their team is the fastest iterating product team at Google. I hope to see some of the changes I listed above adopted, but I won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t happen. Keep up the good work!

The post My Google Data Studio Wishlist appeared first on Portent.

Happiness does not come from what you have, but from who you are and what you think.

You can be the richest person in your locality or in your office but that has no relation to you being happy. You can have the biggest house in the neighborhood but that does not mean you are happy – Well, it might make you happy but only for a very brief moment.

So, what is Happiness and what makes you feel Happy? Science says do these 11 things to be happy, and these are very simple things that each one of us can do to be happy. As we move from 2017 into 2018 , lets focus on doing things that make us feel happy in 2018.

Below are my Top 10 Quotes on Happiness

1) If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion – Dalai Lama

2) “Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are.” – Chinese Proverb

3) “Happiness is not having what you want. It is appreciating what you have.” – Unknown

4) “In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” – Deepak Chopra

5) “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” – Aristotle

6) “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” – Abraham Lincoln

7) “Once you do something you love, you never have to work again.” – Willie Hill

8) “Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.” – John C. Maxwell

9) “A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?” – Albert Einstein

10) “If you want to be happy, be.” -Leo Tolstoy

Have a Happy 2018 and Stay Blessed

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