The free reporting package at Google Data Studio is one of the most commonly used tools for outputting warehouse data into reports. Frakture clients have access to our stock Data Studio report templates; whether customizing those templates to your needs or building afresh,

<aside> ⛔ Note that detailed direct support of report customizations generally falls outside Frakture’s standard service scope. Tips offered here are for guidance only.

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Data Sources can be enhanced in Google Data Studio past the fields they contain in the warehouse.

You might want to do this to capture percentages, ratios, or other figures expressing the relationship between two or more different fields: Frakture provides you the raw metric counts (such as the CRM’s reported number of opens or clicks), but because different users have different data priorities and even different ways to define similar metrics, it’s in your hands to create the second-order calculations that result (such as open rate or click rate).

To do this, navigate to your report’s Data Source(s) by finding “Manage Added Data Sources” under your report’s Resources menu. Then click “Edit” on the Data Source you intend to work with.

Data Studio reports connect to data objects (tables or views) in the warehouse. Google calls these Data Sources.

Now you’re looking at the Data Source itself. Be aware that the Data Source is merely Google’s cache of the underlying table of data in Frakture: you can’t make any change in this environment that will corrupt the data as captured in your Frakture warehouse, so experiment with confidence!

To add a new calculated field, begin by clicking the “Add A Field” link in the upper right-hand corner.

After clicking the “Add A Field” link, you’ll be looking at a blank box to define your field. Give the field a name, and then set up the field using Google’s extensive menu of Excel-like functions.

Here are a few common calculations you might want to consider.

Timestamp fields

Frakture date fields (such as “ts” (timestamp) on transaction tables, or “publish_date” on message tables, or just “date” on various summary-by-date tabes) give a full YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS date (on a 24-hour clock, standardized to Greenwich Mean Time).

• WEEKDAY(ts), WEEKDAY(publish_date) or WEEKDAY(date) outputs the day of the week: useful if you’re analyzing performance for Mondays as compared to Thursdays as compared to Saturdays. Zoom in even closer with HOUR() to see if you should be sending that email first thing in the morning or wait to lunchtime.
• Conversely, zoom back out with functions like MONTH(), QUARTER() or YEAR() to capture big-picture aggregates. WEEK() is an underrated star: it returns the number of the year’s week that the date falls in, from 1 to 52, which is great for year-over-year performance comparison at an aggregation level more granular level than quarterly.

Rate fields

Frakture data objects serve a large number of integer or decimal fields that can be combined and manipulated via Google’s many functions. Most of the core performance rates you’re likely to need will look like simple Excel formulas involving two or three of Frakture’s numerical fields.

• A very basic email open rate would simply be email_opened/email_sent. However …