How To Set Up Data Blending With Google Data Studios

What can you achieve with blended data?

Blending data is really up to the sources of data you currently have available to you from internal tools or 3rd party payment tools you use to collect data. I've messed around with a couple of integrations and came up with a few data combination reports that you may find helpful.

Compare subdomains

Do you have a lead generation site and a consumer portal for users to log in and they are hosted on separate domains or subdomains? Well, now you can combine each domains Google analytics data together to see a complete user journey.

Compare email and CRM data with website performance

Is your business big on direct selling and/or customer retention via email? You could be using one tool for your direct communication (EDM) and another for your personalised communication (CRM). Now you can combine the data from all your platforms and evaluate how campaigns affect your website traffic, where they overlap regarding direct messaging and retention messaging and get a better view of how users travel through your ecosystem.

Compare social media data with website performance

Is your business big on social? Now you can evaluate your paid and organic efforts from your various social platforms and compare the reach you're getting on social media to the actual interactions you receive on your site.

This will give you a better view of how your social media campaigns drive users to the conversions you've set for yourself and the scale, frequency and consumers you need to target to get the best results from your spend on the paid side and your effort on the organic side.

Doubleclick for publishers (Google Ad Manager) data with website performance

Does your business sell ad space to generate revenue? Do you sell direct ads as well as ad space from 3rd party networks like Adsense? If this is the case, you're probably well aware of what a nightmare it is to manage data and create reports around publishing.

Blending your data from Adsense or DFP with your Google analytics can give you fantastic insight into what content efforts are most profitable, which ads work best on what content and help you refine your overall placement and ad serving strategy.

Protip! Using supermetrics data connectors makes it even easier to blend data in real time especially if you have multiple accounts like those of a digital marketing agency.

Finding the right blend

Now that you know how to blend your various data sources go wild, experience with these combinations, find discrepancies, identify trends across platforms and deep dive into insights that would have been missed in the past or been exhausting to uncover.

Data blending is vital as big data becomes more of a prominent concept in business and the elimination of data silos. Google Data studios have now taken the first step in helping digital marketers reduce the impact of data silos with this update but it is still not a fully integrated solution, and I found a few limitations when trying to map data in my dashboards.

However, I'm pretty pleased with what I'm able to do so far, and I suspect Google will look at progressively improving data blending options in the future.