Google Offers Free Data Studio Analytics Tool

As the field of data analytics is increasingly influenced by free and open source offerings, Google is entering the fray with an entirely free offering that could make some waves. Earlier this year, the company unveiled an analytics suite, and now Google has launched Data Studio, a free version of the data visualization tool within that suite. One of its claims to fame is that it has a slew of built in connectors so that you can take data from, say, Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Google Sheets and combine them into customized, single views.

Here are more details.

As part of as part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite announcement a few months ago, Google unveiled the new data visualization and reporting platform for large enterprises — Data Studio 360. According to Google:

"Data Studio lets you connect to all your marketing data and turn that data into beautiful, informative reports that are easy to understand, share, and fully customizable....One of the fundamental ideas behind Data Studio is that data should be easily accessible to anyone in an organization. We believe that as more people have access to data, better decisions will be made. With multiple data connectors, you can now easily create dashboards from many different types of data and share with everyone in your organization - and you can mix and match data sources within a single report. For example, you can combine Google Analytics data and Google AdWords data into a single report."

 Here is a screenshot showing such a mashup:

Google adds the following regarding compatible tools:

"Data Studio offers integration with a wide variety of data sources. There’s also a connector for BigQuery and we will soon have connectors to SQL databases that will let you access first party data. Data Studio is more that just sharing reports with other people — it’s true collaboration. We used the same infrastructure as Google Docs, so you can edit reports together, in real time. This is useful as you combine data from multiple teams and need others to add analysis and context to the report."

You can watch a brief Getting Started video down the page, here, and check out the interactive walkthrough - built with Data Studio.