June GDS Updates – New Home Dashboard & More

If you use Data Studio, there are two new features that you might be interested in knowing about!

Multiple Dimensions on Pivot Tables

Up until this point, you could only add two Dimensions to a pivot table. For example, below we have our two dimensions as Country and Device Category.

A new feature is being able to add multiple Dimensions to the Pivot Table. For example, we can now have rows for Country and City. We can also have columns for Device Category and Channel grouping.

This gives you much more flexibility to dig down into the nitty gritty of your data. 

 

New Home page

You might have noticed that Data Studio got a new home page layout.

The new design is arguably simpler, cleaner and easier to use. 

New Text Functions

Google Data Studio has added five new text functions for you to use with custom fields. 

The next text functions are;

• CONTAINS_TEXT — Returns true if the specified text is found in the field or expression, otherwise returns false.
• STARTS_WITH — Returns true if the field or expression begins with the specified text, otherwise returns false.
• ENDS_WITH — Returns true if the field or expression ends with the specified text, otherwise returns false.
• LEFT_TEXT — Returns a number of characters from the beginning of a specified string.
• RIGHT_TEXT — Returns a number of characters from the end of a specified string.

You might be wondering how you could these, so here’s practical example. Let’s say you’re putting together a dashboard using your Search Console data. But instead of seeing all the individual queries you want to group your queries by topic. 

You can use the “Contains_Text” function to search for specific words and cagegorize them. You can click ‘Add a Field’ in Data Studio and create a CASE statement to create a new dimension.

See an example below;

We’ve now created a new dimension called Query Category using a CASE statement with the Contains_Text function.

Below is the type of data we can get and display in our Data Studio report.

Previously, if you wanted to search for types of text in a CASE statement you’d have to use Regular Expressions (Regex) which can get complicated. These new functions make that a whole lot simpler and quicker.

Hope you found this update useful and visit Data Studio Templates for more updates!