Transcription
Hello Mr. Friends, and welcome to our Looker Studio course. Whether you're an experienced data visualization specialist or just starting out, this course is designed to help you pick up Looker Studio in no time.
We'll cover the essential aspects of Looker Studio, including accessing the platform. Understanding the report editor, we'll take a deep dive into charts, and we'll share some pro tips for creating and using charts. Then, we're going to look at customizing our reports. But because this course is hands-on, together we will build a fully operational dashboard using a free data set that is included.
Regarding the outcome, by the end of this course, you'll have the skills and confidence to work on your own Looker Studio projects. Now, let's dive in and start exploring the powerful features of Looker Studio together.
What is Looker Studio? We're going to cover this very quickly. Looker Studio, which used to be called Data Studio, is a free business intelligence tool from Google that allows you to analyze and visualize your data. But how is this important to you, and how does it stand out from other established BI tools out there? There's quite a lot to say, but we're going to cover the three main reasons.
Number one, it's free, which makes it a cost-effective choice compared to pricey enterprise-level tools. Number two, it's user-friendly, which means that you will avoid the steep learning curve often associated with other paid and even free tools. Number three, integration. Well, being a Google product, it offers familiarity to users accustomed to Google's features and integrates well with other Google products. For example, if you use Google Analytics, then using Looker Studio is a no-brainer.
It can connect to over 800 data sources and has more than 600 third-party connectors, which means that you can connect to any kind of data without coding. While Looker Studio has its complexities, and for more intricate data transformations, other platforms may be preferable. However, if you value quality and a great user experience, Looker Studio is definitely an excellent choice.
Now, enough with this, and let's get to the good stuff. Alright, we're now going to look at how to access Looker Studio, and for this, we are going to head over to Looker Studio's homepage. There, we are going to navigate the page and understand the different features and options that are there. This is because, essentially, this is where you start building your reports.
Now, to access Looker Studio, type lucrstudio.google.com, and we're now in Looker Studio's homepage. This is where you'll find what is referred to as your assets. Assets in Looker Studio first include your reports, and this is why we are now in the reports tab. If you scroll under, you'll find all the reports that are on either by you or anyone else, and the reports that are also shared with you.
The second type of assets are data sources, and this is the data that you send over to Looker Studio for analysis. And lastly, you've got Explorer. Explorer is where you have data that has been manipulated using the Explorer tool. Typically, users will use the Explorer tool in order to understand the underlying data that is in the data source, find quick insights, understand how everything works, in order to use this as a baseline to start creating their reports. But most of the time, you will be spending your time in the reports tab.
Now, the two ways to create reports in Looker Studio: first is by clicking on the blank card here, which has the plus sign. And let's click on it, and you will now be led to the report editor. We are now in the report editor, and a quick prompt will come up. Here is where you have the options to connect to 100 data sources using a connector. We'll talk about connectors in more detail later, but essentially, what connectors do is they allow you to connect to a data source that you can then use in Looker Studio.
Let's say, for example, that you'd like to analyze or visualize Google Ads data. In order to do this, you then use the Google Ads connector. For those of you who analyze website data and have Google Analytics installed on your website, then you'll use the Google Analytics connector, and so on and so forth. For now, I'll just use the Google Analytics connector. I'll select one of my accounts, click on add, and then select add to report.
Congratulations, you're now in the report editor where you start actually building your reports and get your hands dirty. However, since we are going to cover the report editor later, we are going to go back to Looker Studio's homepage. So, this was the first way to create a report.
Now, the second way to create a report is by going to the create button that you have here on the top left corner, which also has the plus sign. If you click on create, you'll have three suggestions. First is report, and this will act the same way as what we just did previously with the blank report here. Then you've got data source, and what that means is instead of accessing the report editor first and have a prompt to choose the data source, you'll first be prompted with the data source and then access the report editor. Then, lastly, you've got the Explorer tool. Again, most of the time, you use report.
Another way to build reports in Looker Studio is to use the template gallery. There, you'll have access to pre-built templates which will just speed up the process. In the template gallery, you can find reports that just suit your needs, and then once you choose one, it is just plug and play. Let's select the marketing template that we have right here.
Now, the purpose of this dashboard is for you to have a quick overview of your website activities. And if this is what you need to do, then this report may be just enough. You can use your own data by going to use my own data here at the top right corner, and then select your data source and click on add. Also, if you like this dashboard but would like to modify it a little bit, you can always use the edit and share button. So, at the top right corner, click on edit and share, click add to report, just wait a few seconds.
Great. At this moment, we now have a copy of the Google Analytics marketing website. So you have a copy of that dashboard. Now, here we can remove charts, change colors, basically do anything you want. Now, before messing with all of this good stuff, we need to first talk about connectors.
To have access to the full list of templates in the template gallery, go to the URL lucasstudio.google.com, add a slash, and add gallery. You now have access and can use plenty of dashboards and reports built by the Looker Studio community. Feel free to explore and don't forget to navigate to community here on the left side for a broader list. However, it's worth mentioning that on our side, for example, we often create reports from scratch, especially when dealing with clients. This is because you have to respect their brand identity, like colors and logo designs, or if they need their reports to display data according to specific requirements.
Alright, that's enough with Looker Studio's homepage. Now, let's look at the report editor. This is what you should see once you have connected to a data source. Looker Studio will randomly add a chart to your canvas, which is the white space that you see here at the back. First, let's rename our report. Go to the top left corner and rename your report. You can always go back to Looker Studio's homepage by clicking on the Looker Studio logo.
Now, we're going to look at the menu and also the toolbar, which is right under the menu. We're not going to spend too much time on the menu because its most important features are made available in the toolbar. For example, if I was to click on the insert tab, we can have the option to add charts to our canvas, but then again, there's a better way to do this using the toolbar version.
You have page here. You can add pages to your report or look at the current page settings. Anchor space settings allows you to change the settings for a specific page in your report because a report can have multiple pages, but we'll talk about this later in the customization section.
Now, go to the resource tab. Here you have different options, and I would like you to focus on manage added data sources. Here you have the data sources available for the current report, and you can also add the data source and select to data source here, that's if you want to have multiple data sources in your report. I'll go back to the manager added resources. You can also add it to data source, more about this in the customization section. You can duplicate the data source or remove a data source from your report.
Now, let's look at the toolbar section. The first feature of the toolbar section is undo and redo, so that you can undo or redo any action performed on your canvas. Then we have the selection mode, and selection mode allows you to click on a component and select it and drag it around. You have then the zoom option. The zoom feature allows you to zoom on a specific component or area of your report for more detailed work. For example, to go back to the default view, simply click on the drop-down arrow and select the default.
Right now, we only have one page on our report, and it is the one that you see right now that we're working currently on with the table chart. To add a page, click here on add page. Look at the right side on the report pages, and now you'll see that we have two pages. The first page is the one that has our table chart, and the second one, the untitled page, is the empty canvas. You can always rename your page by double-clicking on the pl here. You can also do so by clicking on the three vertical dots and rename your page, duplicate your page, delete your page, and hide your page.
In the view mode, and we'll talk about remote a bit later, you can also change the order of your pages. Simply hover on it, click, and then drag and order your pages the way you want.
Now, speaking of view mode, let's go back to our page. First, view mode allows you to see how users will see your report and interact with it. Go to your top right corner and click on the view button. This is exactly how users will see your report. To go back to the report editor, click on edit. To access your pages, you can always hover on this section and click edit pages and find your pages again here.
Now you can add again editor source by clicking on add data source if you want to have a report that has multiple data sources or have a specific charts that has a specific data source, you can use this option. Now we can add the charts. With to add a chart, and here you'll see the options that we have visually as charts that you can add to your reports, which is much better than the option we had before with inserts in the menu section. We're going to talk about charts a bit later in more detail in the charts section, where we're going to help you understand which charts you can use for which situation.
Just to have a quick overview here, we have table charts, scorecards, time series charts so that you can see how you did the trends over time and identify patterns. You also have bar charts and pie charts so you can understand the distribution of your data. You've got maps like Google Maps and Geo charts, line charts, area charts, scatter charts for your scatter plots, pivot tables, bullet charts. These are very good if you have target goals, tree maps for your cohorts or your different groups, and Sankey charts and Gantt charts. Let's select the pie chart, click on it, and then click anywhere you wish on your canvas.
Now, let's look at community visualizations and components. Click on explore more. Community visualizations and components allow you to enhance your reports. For example, you noticed earlier that we were able to add bar charts to our report. Now, these bar charts are static. With the animated bar chart by analyticsbody, you can visualize and animate your charts, meaning that the community gallery allows you to improve and increase the possibilities for your components.
You can add also a control. Click on add control, and you'll find different options here. Mainly, you can use, for example, a drop-down list. This is where you can add data and then filter your components and your other charts by this control. Think of controls as a way to filter components on your charts. So, if I was to click here and let's see that I was just interested on the home page, I could just select home page only, and if I was to click outside, now all the data will be filtered just by the home page. I'll delete this.
Another good control to know is the date range control, found in most dashboards and reports here. Now you have the option to select a date range, or if you were to go on the view mode, your user has now the option to come and select within a range of their liking to analyze the data the way they want. Here, I'm selecting May 1st and May 31st. We have one month of data available. Now we're looking at the report based on this current date range.
Here you have the option to embed a URL. And to give you an example, I'll just delete what we have here, click on URL embed, click anywhere on your canvas. Now, in URL embed properties, you can go and paste your URL here. Here is one of our YouTube videos.
Alright, you also have the option to add images to Looker Studio over here. Click on image, use a URL or upload it from your computer, which is what we're going to do now, and I'll just select the Magic School logo. And here you have your image. You can also have the option to insert a link, and then you have the option to add shapes like lines, arrows, and elbow connectors and curve connectors. You can also add rectangles and circles. You can also change the color. I'm going to background and change the colors. And again, we're going to look at customization later.
And lastly, we're going to look at theme and layout. Let me just change this quickly. Let's add again a table chart. If you go here at the right, click on theme and layout. So themes and layouts are the predefined colors and also settings that you can change in Looker Studio. Here, for example, we are using the current default theme, and we could change this, for example, to this one by constellation. But don't worry, again, we're going to cover customization later, where we're going to also share some pro tips to supercharge your dashboards.
Perfect. We know now how to access Looker Studio and how to get started quickly with templates or how to start dashboards and reports starting from scratch. We also have now a very good understanding of the report editor. Now, let's move on to connectors. Let's learn how to link your data to Looker Studio with connectors.
Connectors fetch data from a platform and send it to Looker Studio. For example, if you had Google Analytics installed on your website and were interested in visualizing this data in Looker Studio, you could then use the Google Analytics connector. There are three types of connectors: Google connectors, partner connectors, and community connectors.
Google connectors are free and give access to Google marketing products like Google Sheets, Google Analytics, and Google Ads. Partner connectors are paid and offer additional capabilities. Examples of well-known partner connectors are from Supermetrics. Their connectors can help pool and format data correctly for Looker Studio from various sources like Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and then have them all in one place like Google Sheets, which can then be used as a data source for Looker Studio. Community connectors belong to the Looker Studio community program and can access various platforms, including public and private company data. For this tutorial, we'll cover how to add data from Google Sheets and Google Analytics 4 using their respective connectors.
In this section, we'll be talking about building charts. If you're unsure about which charts to use for your data visualization needs, this lesson should clarify everything. We won't cover all the charts that exist out there, but we'll definitely cover the most essential chart types, which includes table charts, line charts, bar charts, scorecards, and Geo charts. We'll also share valuable pro tips and tricks to make your visualizations effective.
Let's jump back into Looker Studio. Let's discuss the two common features that are needed to build your charts in Looker Studio, and these are dimensions and metrics. And we are going to discuss what dimensions and metrics are, or where you can find them, and how to use them to build your charts. First, let's focus on the right side in the data panel. In the data panel, here is where you'll find your data sources available for your report. Now, here we've got two data sources: one using Universal Analytics data with the three raw data view, and then one with the new version of Google Analytics known as Google Analytics 4, or GA4.
If you click on one of your data sources, you'll find the list of all the data available in your data source. Now, what are dimensions? Dimensions, simply put, are attributes of your data. They are shown using words or representations that are not in numbers. For example, here we have age, and you will see that we have the ABC icon in green color. Most of your dimensions will always be in this green icon. Now, for dimensions, we also have regional data, city, or country, and you have the map icon. You also have dates with the calendar icon.
Metrics, on the other hand, are your numerical values that you can do calculations with, and they will be presented with the 123 icon, usually in blue. Now, to use this data to build your charts, you'll need to send them over to the properties panel. To find your properties panel, you can simply click on your chart, and you'll see the properties panel appearing. Right now, the properties panel is divided into two sections: setup and style. We'll focus on setup right now.
Here you can see that we can change the data source, and we have added right now the data source for this specific charts. We can change it by clicking here and select one of your data source. You can edit the data source by clicking on the pencil icon. Now, to add the dimension, as here you can see, we have a dimension for the event's name, which you can find again in the event's name colon in the chart, and we also have our metric views that you can also find. Now, in the chart here, let's see how to add dimensions or metrics to a chart, and for this, I'll just remove the event's name.
Perfect. There are multiple ways to add your dimensions and metrics to a chart. First, we can go to the data panel, and rather than scrolling through all your data sets, you can simply go to the search bar and type your dimension or metric name. Let's look for event's name, and here we have it. Now we can click and drag it to the properties panel in the right area, which is at dimension. You can also add the dimension by staying in the properties panel and clicking on add dimension near the plus sign, and look for a dimension. Let's select page, and you should see now age in our chart as well. You can replace the dimension by clicking on the dimension and changing it with something else. You can also replace the dimension by clicking and dragging a dimension on top of the dimension that you like to switch it with.
This way, this simply applies for metrics. Let's now look at the charts available in Looker Studio and in which context you should use them. Let's start with the table chart, which is the one that you see right now in front of us. To add a chart, we can simply go to add a chart and select one of the available table charts. Now, table charts are basic charts that arrange data in rows and columns. This is useful when presenting numerical data that is not easily presented visually.
Then we have scorecards. Let's add the scorecard, and scorecards give you a snapshot of data and can be used to display key performance indicators. There are two types of scorecards: typical scorecards like this one, and scorecards with compact numbers. We can simply copy-paste this one just so that you can understand the difference. And to change the style of your scorecard, or any chart, by the way, you can still remain in the properties panel, and here in chart, click on the drop-down arrow, and then switch this chart to a different scorecard, and we use the one with compact numbers. There you go. The same also available here.
Looker Studio also allows you to add comparisons to your scorecards, meaning that you can look at your data and compare it with a previous period. Let's quickly look at how this works. For this, we'll add a date range control so that our users can select their preferred date range. Let's say we'll select one week's worth of data, so from Monday 1st to Sunday the 7th, seven days of data, and watch our numbers change. Now we have the number of views for this current hit range. Select your chart, and in the properties panel, scroll down to the default data training section, and go to comparison date range, and we'll switch from none to previous period.
What I will do is, if you are looking, let's say at one week of data, then it will look at the past week of data and make a comparison. If you're looking at the whole month of May, then comparisons will compare it with the previous period, so the month of April. Same for years. In fact, for years, you could use previous year, but we'll stick to previous period, which will go from April 24th to April 30th, the past seven days. Now you can see that compared to last week, we've experienced a decrease in views of 13.6%.
Now, let's look at time series charts. Time series charts are useful in displaying how data trends over time. Let's select this time series and we'll change the date range and look at the last 30 days and click apply here. Now you can have an idea of how our views trended over time. Again, line charts are useful to identify trends and patterns. You can also detect anomalies by looking at spikes. For example, we can see that from May 5th to May 6th, there was a sharp decrease in views. This can lead to an investigation.
There are other types of time series charts, such as sparklines and smooth lines. Sparklines are very useful also to have a quick snapshot of your data. In fact, this is the reason why it is very nice to add them in conjunction with your scorecards. You could select your sparkline this way, click on your canvas, reduce the size of your sparkline, and place it near your scorecard. There's another trick to do this, and we'll delete our sparkline. What you can do is change the style of a chart to another, and this is what we'll do with the scorecard. I will select my scorecard, copy and paste it. I'll just remove the comparison. So instead of previous period, this time I'll just select none. And now, what you can do is in the properties panel, your chart, go to the drop-down arrow, and let's switch the style of our chart from a scorecard to a sparkline. Let's select sparkline. Here you go.
Now, let's look at bar charts. Bar charts are used to compare data across categories, and there are different types of bar charts. You have column charts, this is where your charts are displayed horizontally, and also your typical bar chart, which is displayed vertically. Most of the time, you use the bar chart, and we're going to use this one for now. Again, in bar charts, or better used looking at categories. So instead of looking at our date dimension, we'll change it to something like country. Now we can see our top country's previews. You can make also your bar chart more interactive by using the cross-filtering option. I'll go on the select mode, select your bar chart, scroll down in the properties panel to the chart interactions, and enable cross-filtering.
Now, what that would do is, if a user was coming onto a chart and was, let's say, interested in looking at how the data was for India, you could select India here, and now all the charts will display data only for this selection. Again, another way to look at the distribution of categorical data across time or to make comparisons between categories of data is to use column charts. Let's add a column chart right here, and let's say that we were interested to see how our device categories are trending over time. In the properties panel, let's add a breakdown dimension, and we'll select our device category here. Here you go. Now you can see how our device categories run over time, and here we have desktop, mobile, tablet, other, and smart TV, and you can see how each compare to another. If I was interested, for example, to look only at mobile data, I could use a filter. Select your chart, you could add a control, and let's replace the bit dimension with device categories. So your user now can select which device they want to look at. Let's say we're interested only at desktop and mobile.
This is what we'll have. Alright, now let's talk about pie charts. Pie charts are very popular, and they are useful in conveying proportions and percentages. So if you have, for example, data that is divided into several parts, like our device categories, then pie charts will be very useful. And here, in comparison to bar charts, we're not really interested in looking at how it trends over time and identifying patterns, but just at proportions. You have different types of pie charts that you can use, like pie charts or the donut chart. First, to use the pie chart, you can see the proportion of our device categories. We had filtered it, if you remember earlier, with desktop and mobile. So mobile takes up 34.1%, desktop 65%.
Alright, let's talk about Geo charts. Now, Geo charts are used to display data on a map. It can be used to show how data is distributed geographically. We have bubble maps, field maps, bitmap line maps, and also Geo chart. Let's use Geo chart. Now, here you can see which countries bring in the most views, and this can be reflected with the contrasts. So where you see the dark blue color is where we get most of our views, and it is the United States.
Alright, so we will stop here, and there are other charts, and feel free to take the time to study them and understand how they work, but we can go over them a bit quickly. So we have, for example, area charts, and area charts are rarely used. However, their purpose is just like line charts to see how data trends over time, but they're also very useful to understand the quantities for that data. So, for example, let's say that you had a line chart and there was multiple lines, and you were not able really to make a comparison between them, then you use the area chart because the area charts will fill the space under the line, making it easier for you to make a comparison between quantities.
Then we've got scatter charts, and scatter charts are very useful to build, for example, scatter plots in order to understand the relationships between data. You've got pivot tables, got bullet charts, tree maps, Sankey charts, and also Gantt charts. Now, Gantt charts and bullet charts are useful to visualize your targets.
Alright, enough now with charts. Looker Studio offers extensive customization options to make your dashboards unique, from changing chart colors to creating custom dimensions. Instead of going through each option individually, we'll take a more hands-on approach because we will build an entire dashboard together, focusing on essential customization features. Let's get started.
Alright, so we are going to rebuild this dashboard from scratch. Now, the only thing you have to do is just watch me, or even better, follow along as I go through the entire process. Now, we have to build a new report, and for this, we'll click on the blank report card which has the plus sign. We're now prompted to connect to our data set. Now, our data set is actually stored in Google Sheets, and it is called the matrixlab.net, and the specific spreadsheet that we're working on right now is called The Matrix lab web data.
Back to Looker Studio, we'll select the Google Sheets connector, select the correct spreadsheet and the right worksheet, click on add, click add to report. Great. We are now in the report editor and are ready to get started. I'll start by deleting this table. Let's rename our report. Press enter.
Now, what we'll do first is to rebuild our banner. So this will select the shape, click and drag, and let's change the background color. We'll use a custom color. So click here in the custom area on the plus sign. Let's change the hex color to #1f1755. Click on done. Great.
Now, let's add our logos. For this, you'll go to image and we'll upload it from our computer. Now, just to let you know, my logos already have a transparent background. In case your transparency doesn't work, simply go to style and set it to transparent. Otherwise, you may run into a situation like this one. But again, make sure that you already have a transparent background prior. I'll go back to experience and let me resize this. Let's add the second one.
Now, I'll group them together by using my control key on the keyboard and with my mouse, I'll select and hold the Ctrl key, right-click, and select group. This way, I can just move them together at the same time. Click on view to preview your work. Great. Right now, I believe that the dashboard's height is a bit too short for my liking. So we'll reduce this. Let's go back to edit.
Now, go to theme and layout, layout, scroll down, and in a canvas size section, go to height, and let's change this to 1050. Press enter. Now the height has been adjusted and increased.
Now, we'll add our date range selector. Go to add control, select date range control, and we'll place it right here. Now, you may not see it because of the colors, so we'll change. Go to style, and for date range picker, let's select white. Perfect.
Now, let's build our scorecards. Go to add chart, and let's select the first scorecard. Let's increase the size. That should be about enough. Now, we'll change the metric from record count to views. In GA4, these are equivalent to page views. Now, we'll add a sparkline to our scorecard. Select date for the other comparison option, the period, and now we'll go to the comparison date range and we'll select previous period. Click apply.
Now, nothing will appear. We won't see the small comparison that shows the percentage based on a previous period, but once we selected it range, they will appear. Let's hang on for now. Now, let's style this up a little bit. We'll go to style, and let's change the background of the scorecard. We're going to select the color we added before, and come back to background, and we'll add some gradient. So click here on gradient, let's select 45 for the angle, click on done. Nice.
Now, let's change the color of the font. Go to labels, and let's select white. We don't see the sparkline very well, so we'll change also the color of the sparkline. Go here in the sparkline section, and let's select about this color. Great. I also want to fill the area under the sparkline like an area chart. So click on fill, and then we're going to smooth out our spikes by clicking on smooth. This just makes it easy on the eyes.
Now, we can drag our scorecard right here. I also just want to center everything. So go here and center metric name, the metric value, and the comparison. Fantastic. You can right-click on your scorecard and duplicate it or copy and paste it, and you can also use your keyboard shortcuts to do so. Ctrl C and then Ctrl V. Once again, this way we don't have to build every scorecard again from scratch. The only thing left now is just to change the values, the dimensions, and the metrics.
So here, we select the second scorecard, and we want to see the number of total users instead of views. So go to metrics, click on it, and let's find also users. Perfect. Let's go to the third scorecard, and here I'm interested to see the total number of conversions. All right, again, don't worry because if you don't see any comparisons or if you see a flat line for conversions, this is because we did not select date range yet. And just to let you know, the available dates for this data set starts from April 11 to May 7. Let's select something here. So we'll select, let's say, the 18th of April to the 24th of April, so seven days. Now click on apply, and here the magic works.
You can always change the colors of the comparisons if they're not easy to read. In fact, if you look at percentages, it is very hard to see them. What you can do now, we can drag or select all the three scorecards together. In the properties panel, go to style, and you can change the color of the comparison field. So here we'll change the negative color, add it to something a bit lighter, something like a yellow.
Now, let's round the corners of our scorecards. Again, select them all, go to style, scroll down, and let's change the border radius to 5. As you can see, the corners are rounded.
Now, let's welcome our users with a welcoming text. And for this, our puppy, this waving hand emoji. Now, let's add next. Go to text. Click here, and you won't be able to see anything because the font color is black and with the background, but you can still type your text. And let's say, "Welcome to your dashboard." And now let's select everything. Let's change the font color to white. Let's increase the font size about 20, and let's go extra bold. And we can paste our waving hand. Make this a bit larger. Much better.
Now, I want to give the option to users or anyone who can view this dashboard to either download it or share it. So a nice option that you have is to go to add a control and click on button. I'll change the text. Let's start this up again. Little go to style, and let's change the font color to white. We'll change also the background color and use our custom color that we had initially for our banner. Let's take care of the opacity, something like 70, and we'll change also the border color to this one, and for the for the weight, select two. I think the font size is too big, so let's go for 18. Much better.
Now you have the option to insert a link. So feel free to insert any link you want. This can also be the page of one of your reports if you have another page. I'll add a second button. So I'll copy-paste this one. Go to setup, and this time we'll change the action type. Go to report actions. So we'll choose an action that users can have with this button, and we'll select download report. Let's rename this. Now users can come and download this report as a PDF.
Again, we'll add a third button. Point share. Let's go to report actions again, in button action type, and now let's select invite people. Here you may add people in groups to your dashboards and limit their restrictions. It can either be viewers or editors. This will be up to you.
Now, I do not need a menu, but let's create one in case you run into this situation. Looker Studio has different menu options and also sets one for you by default, but we will create our own. This will be a basic one, and if you want to learn more about menus, check our video that covers everything about custom menu navigations.
First, we'll need to add some pages. Go here, add page, and let's rename our first page. Boom. Let's rename the second one. I'll just say audience, and we'll add in another page. This will be a page to contacts. Let's go back to the home page.
Now, let's see the process to create a menu. First, you need to add some text. So here, select text. Again, we won't be able to see anything because the font color is in black, so let's change this to white. We can now start typing, and we'll type "Home" or "Home Page." Now, click to select the text, and in the properties panel, go to insert link. Here under, and now you can select one of the pages of your report, and we'll select the home page. Click apply.
Now, because this is a link, the color will change. What you need to do is select it again, and now you're again in the properties panel. Remove the underline by selecting the underline, and let's change it in the color white. Now, if the color still hasn't changed, and simply click again on your text box, go back to the font color, pick a different color, and then pick white again. This will do the trick. I will center my text.
Scorpion Business. I'll change the text, and now the only thing left to do is select each one of them and make sure that you select the correct report page, and we are now done with our banner. Let's preview this. Click on the view button, and this is what we have.
Now, to remove this default navigation, go back to edit, go to theme and layout, go to layout, and here you have the default navigation type, which is set on the left. You have a different one that you can explore, but we'll select hidden. And now, if I was to view our dashboard, the default navigation is gone.
Let's change the background color of our page. Go to page in the menu, turn page settings, style, and let's change the background, and let's use our custom color with the gradient.
Now, let's build our charts. Let's add the chart, and we'll add first a time series chart to look for the trends in our number of views. Let's remove the grid lines. We're going to make the grid line color transparent. Go to grid line color, set it transparent, and for the axis, we'll select white. Let's also change our line color and line weight. Outside this color and increase the line weight to three. Let's also style our border. So scroll all the way down to background in border, and select five border ridges. Here's the watercolor set. Let's increase our weight to two. There you go.
Now, let's add our Geo charts, but first, I'd like to build our outline. Let's use a shape. Let's make the background transparent, change the border radius to 5 for a color, and the border weight to two. Now, let's add our map to other chart, and we'll select the Geo chart, this one. Let's style the colors for the maximum value color. Let's select our initial custom color. Alright, let's resize our map. I'll remove also the legend and select show legend. Great.
Now, let's add the word chart. Now, the reason for this is because with your chart, sometimes if you have lots of data, it may be a bit difficult to identify the countries that bring the results that you need. So one cool trick is to select a chart, and then we are gonna copy-paste our chart. Now we should have two charts, and now what you will do, keep the selection, go to chart in the properties panel, right above style, and let's change our chart to a bar chart right here. Fantastic.
Now, I'm just interested in the top five countries. So let's reduce the number of bars to five. Let's change our color and have it set to this one. We also need to change the metric from conversion to oscillate users, total users. So basically, we're looking at our top five countries in terms of users. Let's go back to style again, make liquid color transparent, let's change the axis color to white. Now, let's resize this. Lastly, make sure to enable cross-filtering. This way, we can filter the database on one of our selections. So scroll down to the bottom in the properties panel on the setup, in chart interactions, and enable cross-filtering.
Now, users will have the option to select one control of their choosing, which will filter out all the data on our chart. I'll select Germany. Everything will change now. Great. Let's continue.
Now that we know our top countries, we also would like to know what are our top pages, the content that brings us the most users. At the chart, this time we'll select the table chart. Great. Select your table chart. In style, we are going to make our text more visible. Go to header color, let's set it to white, so you can see what we're doing. This is for the headers. Now, for the table labels, again, on color, and select white. Let's remove our row numbers. Let's remove the header background color and set it to transparent. Let's remove this other border color, transparent as well.
Now, I'll reduce this chart so that we can focus only on the top 5 pages. Here we do have the date dimension, and we'll replace it with something like page title. Back in style, I'll remove the pagination. Now, let's add our border color. Let's change the border ridges first to five. We'll color this one, adjusting to fix the border weight, and set it to two. Here you go.
Now, let's add our device categories and also a space for users to contact us if needed. Go to add a chart. Let's use the donut chart. Replace the dimension with device category. Go back to style. Let's manage the dimension values and their colors. So let's change desktop, and I'll select this color. Let's change mobile, use our custom color, and it should work. There you go.
Now, let's switch up the legend. I would like it at the bottom. I'll reduce and on a chart, and let's do the same thing again for the polar radius color. In fact, to create more space, I'll just remove the legend, select none. Now I'll just adjust the table chart a little bit. Everything is just applying. I've used views here, but you can also add other metrics like number of users and revenue and number of conversions.
Let's move on to our contact section and let's add the shape. There's a background color. Let's use our custom color. If you look at the initial dashboard, the images that you see here were actually built on canvas, and then I removed the background and downloaded them with a transparent background. So now, just upload your image, size this. Perfect. Let's add some text here. Here's the font size. I can hold. There you go.
Now, I'll not go through the entire process of adding titles because you should know how to do this by now. All right, now we have added our descriptions, devices, top pages, users with trend, top countries, and you may have maybe noticed that I should change views for users. Now, let's add our filters, and then we'll be done. We are interested in knowing from where our users came from. So we will add the source and the medium as filters.
Let's go to add control, click drop-down list. In the control field, I'll just use a session source medium. Style this up, and now you should all know how to do this. Can rename our dimension. Go here on the pencil icon, and let's rename this. Don't worry, you can always refer to what is the initial source field, which is right under here.
Now, to add the kind of icons that you see here, you can go to a site like flaticon.com and type in the type of icon that you're looking for. Now, you select an icon. Now, what you can do is edit the icon and change the colors around, and you can then download it here as a PNG. And 64 pixels will be more than enough for our usage. And also, make sure to always have a page in Looker Studio, an additional page where you added the credits to attribute your images. Since I have already downloaded mine, I'll just bring it here quickly, and let's choose this one, and voila.
Let's select the date range, so April 18th to April 24th, and let's apply. Now, scorecard should be working, and here is our full dashboard and size. So here you go. Wow.
We come to the end of this tutorial, and honestly, thank you so much for joining us on this journey to learn Looker Studio. We've covered everything from accessing the platform to creating customized charts, and we've done it all in a hands-on way by building a fully operational dashboard using a free data set. By now, you should have the skills to create your own data visualizations with Looker Studio. Remember to keep exploring and experimenting with the powerful features of this tool. Thanks again for watching, and feel free to like the video or subscribe if this was useful to you. This was Eric from Major School, and see you next time.