Frakture offers a stock template for Google Data Studio. We’ll be happy to deploy that for you on request.
Frakture’s Data Studio template has pre-fab report pages ready-made to connect with the standard data objects that our services construct. Below are some representative sample panels; your own reports might vary slightly.
Sample Data Studio page: Email Performance
Sample Data Studio page: Facebook Ads
Sample Data Studio page: Performance By Channel
Disclaimers
While Google Data Studio is convenient and free, you should be aware that it has some limitations. Frakture can’t provide comprehensive support on Data Studio, but these are some of the most common issues we’ve seen:
- To limit its bandwith footprint, Data Studio does not directly query live data tables, but rather caches that data. As a result, outputs in your Data Studio reports might lag behind updates to your warehouse data by several hours.
- Data Studio limits its cached data to 100,000 rows per object or table. When data sets exceed this figure, which can easily occur with, e.g., the transaction history for a moderately high-volume organization, you’ll experience unpredictable gaps in the reported data reflecting the fact that some rows have simply been excluded from Data Studio’s cache. (Gaps in the cached tables will also knock on to gaps in aggregate sums based on those tables.) Frakture itself does have the complete data in the warehouse – but Data Studio might not reflect it all.
- Data Studio has been known to experience (generally brief) connectivity interruptions that might result in your data sets being null and the reports they support presenting empty data or error messages.
- There are a few query idiosyncracies in Data Studio. We’ve done our best to steer around them in the stock templates but it’s still possible you’ll run into eyebrow-raising results, especially if you attempt to customize reports. One specific common annoyance is that Google has a bug when combining aggregation functions (e.g. “Count Distinct”, used for a tally of donor gifts) plus a date range filter (e.g. specifically the count of gifts last week, instead of all-time).
Tips for Optimizing Google Data Studio with Frakture data