Podcast Episode 14: Looker Studio What's changed and why reporting still matters
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm Pip from Seymour Digital Media. You're listening to Know How Marketing Lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, cyberpunk Geeks, marketing Mixer. Each week we get on here and we talk. About something. Search marketing like Google Ads or seo, social media marketing from Facebook to TikTok or website marketing.
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[00:00:48] You all know me on pep, more digital media, and that's Fallon. Yeah. I'm also at Seymour Digital Media. Our powers combined and we take over the world. We are talking about Look Studio [00:01:00] today, because Looker Studio used to be called Data Studio and we love our reporting, so we wanted to dive right into that and talk about all the things.
[00:01:11] So if you are doing any sort of reporting and you're not using Data Studio, Or Liquor Studio. This might not be the one for you, but if you are interested in reporting and you wanna try, Google's free tool called Data Studio. Liquor Studio. This one's for you. Fallen. What is Data Studio? Studio, what was yeah, what was Data Studio?
[00:01:36] What is Liquor Studio? Let's just go there. Yeah, so the Looker Studio is, I guess it looks like in 2020, Google bought a company called Looker, which does business intelligence and machine learning. And basically they bought it and they've been slowly integrating it into Google Cloud. And so now has been the official.
[00:01:56] Launch of the Looker as part of their platform. [00:02:00] So for a lot of people, when I looked into what are the big changes, a lot of people, it aren't gonna be affected really that much unless you're on like enterprise level, cuz like just using business intelligence, machine learning, most people just don't have the data.
[00:02:14] Like you need so many huge tables of data for it to be useful for you. So I'd say for the most part it's a. Weird fanfare that I don't even know why they changed the name, because it doesn't really look not as like valuable unless you're an enterprise person. Oh, okay. So if I'm a small and medium business, or a smaller medium agency and I use reporting, I don't need to worry about all the fanfare of the changes that they're talking.
[00:02:45] Yeah, I honestly, I haven't really found anything where it was like, oh, okay, that's the big thing. That's the change that everybody, the logo changed. The logo changed and the name changed. But like beyond that, it's really not, I haven't seen anything that's been super like, Ooh, [00:03:00] yeah, that's the big change.
[00:03:01] It's not like Google Analytics four, where that's gonna be a huge change and the entire system's completely. Or Google business profile and how they're spitting out on the search engine results pages to manage it. No complaints really. No complaints. Yeah. So the reason I guess we like diving into the reporting is cuz when I started.
[00:03:21] The business before failing came on board and took over. When I found this reporting was when I knew I, I felt like I had a business cause I felt like I could give something to clients to show what we've done or what's working or what's not working. And it was Data Studio. We were using Data Studio in beta and so now we use Data Studio and we use an add-on called Supermetrics, but we're not gonna get into that cuz you can use the free version.
[00:03:48] And it's gorgeous. It's quite easy to use even if you don't understand some things, right? Like literally you can click a couple buttons. and then you have a report, your analytics [00:04:00] and your search console. And so it's quite easy. And people make templates of these that they even sell, right? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:04:09] It's definitely, yeah, there's a whole ecosystem of kind of add-ons. And even you can make your own custom visualization, so if you wanted something to look a certain way, you could even design it yourself. Like I know that there's, what was it, like a gauge with one of 'em, which is cool, like a.
[00:04:25] Like a zero to 100. And so if you wanna be in a certain range, then you can use this visualization. So there's lots of add-ons and it's smart that Google opened it up so much that people can build their own add-ons. And you can also, like, when you get really advanced, you can bring in your own special bits of data from like a spreadsheet, and then you can configure it to be like, oh, I want it as this number.
[00:04:49] This type of data comes in. I want it to be labeled like this. And you can do all kinds of crazy. doing cool things. Okay, so I'm doing some cool things. Mine, maybe about [00:05:00] design, which is really weird, but maybe it's cuz it's square blocks. I can manage it. But you are doing some cool things, like you brought in Reddit data, you brought in tweets of specific nature, so tracking like a business owner's business name or, yeah. And Twitter. Catching all the tweets. Yeah. So that's one of the really cool ones about the data studio that we've been tapping more into is having a controller that says okay, I want every bit of data on this whole page to be filtered out if it doesn't meet this condition. And so you can do things like your search console and it has a, if the query, so what someone typed into Google.
[00:05:40] Contains digital marketing. I wanna know how every single keyword that contains the word digital marketing, how those performed in my search console. And so it'll filter everything on the table so you can only get that data. And so it gives you like a really good ability to see, oh, this, I'm ranking really well for this, or, Hey, there's a big increase in the number of [00:06:00] impressions for this keyword.
[00:06:01] I'll actually open up my Google ads. My data studio and Google Analytics all at the same time. Sometimes when I'm working to dig deeper, that's what SEOs get to do, which is really fun. And Google ads people, you get to kinda see something and you know you're reporting to your client about something, but then you have to do all the digging under the surface to find like the really cool stuff like keywords and ranking and ah, yeah, it's brilliant.
[00:06:30] So I'm seeing that there's a question here that there's a pro. Version level of liquor Studio. I'm not sure what it are. We using the pro version. No, the pro version is very much part of the Google's Marketing 360 platform, which is their enterprise one because a lot of stuff that, like a lot of the paid tier of the Google marketing products, the big difference is that one, you're paying them $10,000 a month.
[00:06:56] And then the other thing is that most of the real tools [00:07:00] and differentiation is the a business intelligence machine learning aspect. They can't even use Google Sheets. Everything has to. Set up in Big Query because like they've got like million rows of information of, so we're talking like, what kind of businesses are we talking here?
[00:07:17] Walmart, Coke, Nike, target Pack, or Yeah. Yeah. Like a big company that's basically they're they're having a million dollar, couple million dollars. A budget and their websites are massive and their campaigns are like, there's so many bits of data that are going into their campaigns that no human could possibly go through.
[00:07:40] It. Also, they use the machine learning to basically sort out, Hey, we've noticed this, that I dunno, like soccer moms and Duluth are buying more stuff from us. We should really focus more efforts there. Like weird little trends like that where you're comparing like demographics versus location versus campaign type.
[00:07:58] And it's just you need [00:08:00] so much data to make that work that like they're gonna need that. So our version, we use a slice of the data, right? And we get to look at all this stuff and make pretty good decisions based. The size of the websites we're looking at, stuff like that, right? Yeah. Like the level of data that we're getting from us and our clients is much more manageable.
[00:08:23] That you can be like a normal person and just go through and be like, oh, hey. Yeah, like Google Ads is doing really well. It's getting us a bunch of conversions. Cause the, just the number's much more manageable that you don't need to be, think. I got asked what a conversion was from a client, which is really interesting cuz you just generally think for language purposes that they're gonna know what you're talking about.
[00:08:46] So anybody out there who doesn't know what a conversion is, it is a lead. And a lead being like somebody calling or filling out a form or doing those things. I know you probably all know that, but if there's that one person, [00:09:00] I gotta. Because I gotta practice for my class to integrate them into the language.
[00:09:05] Oh. The other side of conversion can also be a purchase. So if someone buys something from your website, that would also Yeah. So it's either someone's filling out a form or some sort of lead or a purchase. That's the other one. Yeah. And We love the reporting well cause it's pretty, it's fun.
[00:09:23] There's so much ability to move things and make them your own. And is it open source? Is that why other people can make these wicked reports? And it's so easy to copy a report. It's not technically open source cuz like we don't know what the coding goes into it, but what it would be is there's open APIs so basically like it, they, you don't know what the code is, but they said, Hey, you can access the coding by talking to this API connection.
[00:09:50] Here's the rules. And so it opens it up. We're basically, they've given you the tools to build on top of it. Of course you need some sort of coding to really know how to [00:10:00] manipul. Properly. And I mean there's lots of different reportings. I think I like Looker Studio because of all the integrations.
[00:10:07] Like you can pull in Twitter and YouTube and Reddit and Facebook and Instagram and all. You can have all the reporting, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's much more, I find it's much easier to manipulate the Looker Studio than it is to any of the other platforms like. They've done a pretty good job at it.
[00:10:29] And you know the, obviously for Google, like their incentive is to give you really good tools so that you keep spending money on Google Ads because then you can show your clients that with the Google ads. Hey, look at this nice report. It's all nice and fancy and you can look year over year or something like that.
[00:10:47] Want to know more about seo? We've got a class for that. Our mission is to educate students about the right tools, techniques, and strategies to grow their businesses using the most up to date search engine marketing [00:11:00] optimization techniques and tools. Find out [email protected]. Let's talk about reports for a second.
[00:11:11] Just on the level of some of the things we've seen in reporting because, so we love Data Studio and it's easy to use and it's free and it's made by Google. There are reports in side systems like analytics. You can pull data from search console on your own so you can pull out all the information you want.
[00:11:31] But we see some agencies doing Google Doc reports. How do you feel about those? We just saw one the other day. I think Dry is. Kind of word. It was like I could feel my eyes rolling in the back of my head because like people don't need, even if it's just bullet points most people just wanna see, hey green, the number increased.
[00:11:56] The number went up. It went up by [00:12:00] 30%. Some quick information like that is much more valuable Also. No having it written out compared to a table where you can actually compare and maybe sort them differently. So I wanna know which campaign is getting the most clicks in my Google ads.
[00:12:15] Okay, which one's getting the most conversions? Are those the same? And what are we doing if they've gone down? Because it doesn't go constantly up like a hockey stick all the time. Yeah, for sure. And I've seen that in Google ads. Sometimes there's a disruption and then you have to, you're like, oh God, , and then you going into to see what's wrong.
[00:12:36] But reporting's really important and I think just having the free tool to use and connecting like your just goo Google Analytics and search console together can give you lots of information. And it's fun. I think it makes the reporting fun and I think those other reports are bit dry, lackluster. We have trouble conveying things because the language is like conversions and [00:13:00] things like that, and we're working.
[00:13:01] Ways to give people the information they need so they don't, cause sometimes you feel dumb when you're like, Ooh, what's that? You know what I mean? What is a session? Yeah. What is a page view? All, like, all terms that business owners aren't gonna have time to review or know, cuz that's not what they're in business about.
[00:13:20] Yeah, exactly. There is a degree of how to communicate it to a client who generally they don't spend all their time thinking. Digital marketing, they are thinking about did I get more leads? Okay, what are these leads asking for? Like they're more concerned about Yeah. Or doing the business.
[00:13:38] Yeah. Or do these people care about my business because hey, they're seeing this, so they're doing that. I think that gives, it gives a great opportunity. It gives a great opportunity. So we have actually sold, worked on somebody's Google Ads account. We include seo. in the reports because we're connecting everything anyway, but it has given us an [00:14:00] opportunity to sell on the other service we offer.
[00:14:03] Yeah. And or even expand it out further where it's like, Hey, you actually are getting a lot of traffic from Bing. Why don't we put some ad spent in money? Yeah. Yeah. And so extending out a little further the services that you're offering, because you're f. Picking up with this data that says Hey, you're actually getting leads organically from big one.
[00:14:22] And we put some money into it. And there's things like that where you can open up new opportunities. And as well, the reporting's really useful for clients because it's a way that you can, they don't just have to take your word for it, right? Like you're having this analytics, it's actually recording it so they're, they can see, oh, actually, yeah, you guys have been getting my numbers up year over year.
[00:14:43] Okay. That's really good. It's a way to quickly show a client what value you're providing them. Which is always hard when you're doing things that could be ethereal, like doing SEO is not always easy to convey how much better they're doing now than they [00:15:00] were six months ago. I also found that cuz when we send out reports, it's month after month we send a report and we actually download the PDFs.
[00:15:08] So while we can use them as case studies at some point, but so we can also look back quickly and having a picture. To help you visualize and cuz you can more easily move through numbers when they're in the same places and they're easy to view. It's not some text document. So I guess, so what we're saying is we love reporting and Oh yeah.
[00:15:32] And also Data Studio is a very robust system that, as you can tell, that what I said earlier, you can do. Infinitely deeper things with it. So it's always you're never gonna be quite done with it. It's like Google Ads, the, there's always a new thing to learn in the platform, and you're never gonna be 100% perfect with it.
[00:15:54] I did, yeah. Go on. Sorry. Oh go ahead. Oh no, I was just gonna talk about myself. No . [00:16:00] No, I was gonna talk about how on the weekend I did take the day off and I did spend a lot of my day playing with the reports to cause because you can make them look pretty and individualized.
[00:16:14] And I just, I don't know, I think a good report goes a long. I could be wrong. That just might be me. I should ask more questions to my class . We did, so one thing that we did and notice that we want we were joking about is that we had a client who had. Deleted a page before checking with the search console.
[00:16:35] And so this would be a good use case for it of she had deleted the page and then you went and checked on search console. And it turns out that was the most visited page she had on her website. And had she known that she would never have deleted the page. Yeah, exactly. And so this gives you a really quick way as well that if you go to your search console page and you're like clicks okay.
[00:16:57] Which page? Which page? It's getting the most clicks. [00:17:00] Oh, it turns out it's this page. Okay. Maybe I won't delete it. Maybe I'll rewrite it so it'll look fresh and Yeah. Up to date, update it. Which is something Google does want you to do with your content. Yes, which makes your content better. And then it's just not billions of useless pages on the internet, but you're actually making good, valuable content for people.
[00:17:19] Yes, I think that's one of the best things about sel doing those two things together. So it says, talk about lead. Who did what? Who did want reporting? Tell me They didn't want, so they didn't want reporting. Sorry, I oh yeah. So we got a lead a little while. And we knew it wasn't gonna be a client for us.
[00:17:41] And one of the things we set people up with is the reporting. And this person said I don't want any reporting. I see everything I need in my Shopify store because that tells me sales. But that doesn't leave room for [00:18:00] improvement because it's great. You can see sales and. This thing has the most sales, but then what missing?
[00:18:09] Yeah, so Shopify's really good for everything that happens after someone clicks, add to cart, like all the data that happens of them go through the checkout and how many orders you got. That part Shopify is that's gospel. Take that as your. Source of truth. I think that's happening with your marketing, like people coming to your website and which traffic channels are getting the most time on page, which pages are they visiting?
[00:18:33] How many pages are they visiting? That's not really well handled by your Shopify analytics. And you know us that would be doing the marketing and we're supposed to be sending traffic there. We need to know not only. What traffic it's getting sent to what pages and which one's converting.
[00:18:49] Because one of the ones that we had with another former client is that she was spending a ton of money on Instagram ads and she was getting zero sales from, or [00:19:00] one or two for the thousands of people that are visiting the page. And so she stopped running the Instagram ads because it turns out her custom, she was doing jewelry, her custom pieces that were way higher.
[00:19:12] Price point, that was all time with Google Ads. It turns out that was what was making her money, like actually making money. So again, you could, you not, it's not only like, how many sales did I get, but you wanna look at, okay, what's your return on. You have to know I'm spending X number of dollars on Google ads and it's getting me actually like thousands of dollars in work versus I'm spending thousands in Instagram ads and it's getting me like one or two sales that are at a lower price point.
[00:19:37] So you gotta know what's your return? And it this is where it's the full spectrum of not only how people are finding your site, but out of those sources of traffic, which ones are actually. Yeah, and there's so much you can learn because if you have a certain percentage of people going to your site and they're not taking an action, then you know you have to fix something on your site.
[00:19:57] Might not know what, but then at least you have [00:20:00] a place to start. And so yeah, reporting well just, it makes the world a better place. Yeah, it's gonna make it a lot easier for you to just be able to see what's going on at a quick glance. It may not like have every single little detail. Oh, there's also one other cool feature that we haven't gotten into as well, which is blending the data.
[00:20:22] So you can actually have tables with multiple data sources going to it. So you've technically, you could have the data from search consoles, the keyword. That's a lot of the information in Search Console that you want, the keywords that the specific pages are ranking for. Yes. It would be the time on page based on the url.
[00:20:42] Like whatever, like the about page has this many people spending this much time on it and it's ranking this well, like it's average positions. This. So there's a lot to play with. Are we experts in well, Looker Studio? We'd like to think so. But like all Google things, we're constantly [00:21:00] learning.
[00:21:00] It's constantly changing, and so it's good to be in there now there's no time like the present to pick something. I know we often get emails about other companies wanting us to meet with them, to move reporting. And I think reporting is a lot like your cr. Once you've picked one, you're sticking to it, or like your project management.
[00:21:23] System, once you pick something, you're gonna stay with it for years, right? Yeah. Yeah. Unless something really has like a big draw that you just didn't know from before when you picked it, but generally it changing CRM systems is pretty annoying. You take reporting systems would be hard too, right?
[00:21:41] Just cuz of how you learn how to do it. So I say if you're looking for reporting, Try Data Studio. We'll link it in the comments, but try Data Studio. Check it out. If you'd like a sample report of ours, message me and I will send it to you. And I think. What else can we [00:22:00] About Liquor Studio besides, it's cool.
[00:22:03] Yeah, definitely a really cool system. I don't get why they changed the name, but whatever. Google, it sounds like you do get why they changed the name. It's just nobody else can understand it because it's all about some other weird company. They bought Google Bots. Yeah. Yeah. But what I'm saying is like, Looker could have been its own add-on to Data Studio, because right now Looker's technically its own system as well.
[00:22:24] So it doesn't really, that's why I'm like, I don't really get why you needed to change the name of this reporting system because technically it doesn't connect you. And it's a stupid name. We all agree. We all agree. Data Studio sounded cool sounded like it had the word data in it, which you know, Helpful.
[00:22:42] Made sense thematically, what was going on, setting the report to your client. Here's your Looker studio report. Yeah. Anyway, we are sadly outta time, even though we started a bit late today. We don't like to keep you here longer than we say. We're going to fa do you know what's [00:23:00] happening next week? That is a great question.
[00:23:02] No, I don't off the top of my head it is. Oh, how darn it, I'm wrong. I thought it was the 24th. Next week it's the 17th, so it's graphic design for advertisements. Ooh. With Rena and Greg. That's gonna be a great topic. I might have to watch that one to be honest. I got something to learn. , if you're joining us in the YouTube channel or on a social media business page, we do have a Facebook group where we do meet and.
[00:23:29] All things marketing called Cyberpunk, marketing Geek Mixer, long name great people because it's all a group effort. Anyway, we will see you next time. Hi.
[00:23:39] The conversation never stops in our Facebook group, cyberpunk Geeks. Join us at facebook.com/groups/cyberpunk geeks to ask your questions, meet new friends, and learn even more about search, social and websites.
