Tag Archives: Google Data Studio

Campaign Anomaly Detector

Posted by Meirav Shaul, Dvir Kalev, Roy Sela, Omri Levy, Tal Rimon Edelstein, Elad Ben-David, and Tzhahi Zilberstein, Team Lead

A while ago Google released “Account Anomaly Detector” which you know.

A few clients approached the gTech team at Google, asking to add some monitoring capabilities.

That’s why we created an unofficial, open-source evolved version of it. We named it “Campaign Anomaly Detector”. It has recently been published on github, ready for advertisers to deploy and use it for defining and detecting metrics anomalies.

Hosted on github, everyone is more than welcome to contribute more code to this ever-growing project. Happy monitoring!


Solution Requirements

Key Features

  • Entity to Monitor - option to select all/some child accounts under an MCC/specific campaigns.
  • Period selection - option to select both current and past periods for comparison
  • Metrics Selection & Anomaly Definition - option to select key metrics to be monitored, and the threshold values which will be considered as anomalies.
  • Dashboard - Data studio dashboard that presents identified anomalies
  • Email alerts - option to define the emails to notify once anomaly is identified

Key Components

The solution includes the following components:

  • Configuration Sheet (“input”) - Google Sheet for setting the monitoring parameters (entities for monitoring, period selection, metrics & thresholds, email alerts)
  • Simulator to support the period calculation and settings
  • Dashboard Sheet (“results”) - dedicated tab in the configuration sheet, that presents the identified anomalies
  • Data Studio Dashboard that presents the identified anomalies


Tutorial Video


Github

  • Find the open source repository here. 

Disclaimer

Copyright 2022 Google LLC. This solution, including any related sample code or data, is made available on an “as is,” “as available,” and “with all faults” basis, solely for illustrative purposes, and without warranty or representation of any kind. This solution is experimental, unsupported and provided solely for your convenience. Your use of it is subject to your agreements with Google, as applicable, and may constitute a beta feature as defined under those agreements. To the extent that you make any data available to Google in connection with your use of the solution, you represent and warrant that you have all necessary and appropriate rights, consents and permissions to permit Google to use and process that data. By using any portion of this solution, you acknowledge, assume and accept all risks, known and unknown, associated with its usage, including with respect to your deployment of any portion of this solution in your systems, or usage in connection with your business, if at all.

Introducing the Data Studio Community Connector Codelab

Posted by Minhaz Kazi, Developer Advocate, Google Data Studio

Data Studio is Google's free next gen business intelligence and data visualization platform. Community Connectors for Data Studio let you build connectors to any internet-accessible data source using Google Apps Script. You can build Community Connectors for commercial, enterprise, and personal use. Learn how to build Community Connectors using the Data Studio Community Connector Codelab.

Use the Community Connector Codelab

The Community Connector Codelab explains how Community Connectors work and provides a step by step tutorial for creating your first Community Connector. You can get started if you have a basic understanding of Javascript and web APIs. You should be able to build your first connector in 30 mins using the Codelab.

If you have previously imported data into Google Sheets using Apps Script, you can use this Codelab to get familiar with the Community Connectors and quickly port your code to fetch your data directly into Data Studio.

Why create your own Community Connector

Community Connectors can help you to quickly deliver an end-to-end visualization solution that is user-friendly and delivers high user value with low development efforts. Community Connectors can help you build a reporting solution for personal, public, enterprise, or commercial data, and also do explanatory visualizations.

  • If you provide a web based service to customers, you can create template dashboards or even let your users create their own visualization based on the users' data from your service.
  • Within an enterprise, you can create serverless and highly scalable reporting solutions where you have complete control over your data and sharing features.
  • You can create an aggregate view of all your metrics across different commercial platforms and service providers while providing drill down capabilities.
  • You can create connectors to public and open datasets. Sharing these connectors will enable other users to quickly gain access to these datasets and dive into analysis directly without writing any code.

By building a Community Connector, you can go from scratch to a push button customized dashboard solution for your service in a matter of hours.

The following dashboard uses Community Connectors to fetch data from Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Twitter. Try using the date filter to view changes across all sources:

This dashboard uses the following Community Connectors:

You can build your own connector to any preferred service and publish it in the Community Connector gallery. The Community Connector gallery now has over 90 Partner Connectors connecting to more than 450 data sources.

Once you have completed the Codelab, view the Community Connector documentation and sample code on the Data Studio open source repository to build your own connector.

Harness your data with Data Studio Community Connectors

Posted by Minhaz Kazi, Developer Advocate

Google Data Studio lets users build live, interactive dashboards with beautiful data visualizations, for free. Users can fetch their data from a variety of sources and create unlimited reports in Data Studio, with full editing and sharing capabilities.

Community Connectors is a new feature for Data Studio that lets you use Apps Script to build connectors to any internet accessible data source. You can share Community Connectors with other people so they can access their own data from within Data Studio.

For example, if you are providing a web-based service to your customers, you can create a Community Connector with a template dashboard to fetch data from your API. In just 3 to 4 clicks, your customers can log into your web app, authenticate with Data Studio, and see their individualized data displayed in a beautiful interactive dashboard.

Here's an example Data Studio dashboard that uses a Community Connector to show live data using the Stack Overflow API:

Try out this Stack Overflow Community Connector yourself or view the code.

Why build Community Connectors

  • Leverage Data Studio as a reporting platform for your customers.
    Provide significant value to your customers by providing them with a ready-made reporting platform. With a minimal development investment, you can rely on Data Studio as a free and powerful dashboarding and analysis solution for your customers.

  • Reach a larger audience and also monetize your connector.
    Publish and promote your Community Connector in the Data Studio Community Connector gallery that is visible to all Data Studio users. Published connectors are also directly accessible from the public Community Connector Gallery. There are also multiple approaches if you want to monetize your connector.

  • Develop customized enterprise solutions for your business.
    Fetch your business data from a variety of sources (e.g. BigQuery, CloudSQL, web API etc.) and create a customized solution specifically for your business. By providing templates with your connectors, you can significantly cut down dashboard building time.

  • Benefit from Apps Script features and use your existing code.
    Since Community Connectors are developed using Google Apps Script, you can benefit from features such as caching, storage, translation, authentication etc. If you already have a Google Sheets connector, it is easy to reuse that same code for a Community Connector.

  • Did we mention it's free?
    Data Studio is completely free to use. And there is no cost for developing or publishing Community Connectors.

How to build Community Connectors

The Get Started Guide can help you to build your first Community Connector. Since Apps Script is a subset of Javascript, you can easily build a connector even if you have not worked with Apps Script before.

You can also jump ahead and view specific steps of the typical development life cycle of a Community Connector:

  • Build: Write your connector code in Apps Script.
  • Use and test: Try out your connector in Data Studio.
  • Deploy: Create deployments for other users.
  • Share: Share your connector.

Publish your connector

You can keep your connector private or share them with other users. You also have the option to publish your connector. Publishing will feature your connector both in Data Studio as well as in the public Community Connector gallery. This enables you to reach all Data Studio users and showcase your service. Furthermore, we encourage you to submit your connector to our Open Source repo so that the community can benefit from it.

What next

If you have any interesting connector stories, ideas, or if you'd like to share some amazing reports you've created using Community Connectors, give us a shout or send us your story at [email protected].

Spotlight on Data Studio: Beautiful Reports and Collaboration Just Got Easier

We launched Google Data Studio (beta) in the U.S. earlier this year, and last week, we expanded availability to 21 additional countries.* We’re excited to offer Data Studio to companies across the globe so they can easily create and share reports and dashboards, and ultimately use insights and collaboration to make better business decisions.

Organizations today collect an increasingly large amount of data. In a world of web analytics, CRM systems, and third-party sources, data-driven decisions should be easier than ever before. However, all of this data has presented a significant challenge: making it easily accessible and useful.

Having multiple data sources that live in silos within your organization compromises your ability to spot critical business opportunities and issues when they matter most. This is a widespread challenge, with 84% of marketers saying they don’t believe their data sources are well-integrated, according to a 2016 Forrester study.

Data Studio solves this problem by allowing you to easily connect your data and create beautiful, informative reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Create up to five custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing. All for free.

Get started today so you can:

  • Put all your data to work. Easily access the data sources you need to understand your business and make better decisions.
  • Transform your data. Quickly transform raw data into easy-to-follow reports and dashboards — no code or queries required.
  • Build engaging reports and dashboards. Data Studio gives you the ability to create meaningful, shareable charts and graphs that bring your data to life.
  • Leverage teamwork that works. Work together quickly, from anywhere, by sharing reports via Google Drive.

Not sure where to start? Good news: We’re releasing our first batch of templates today to remove that hurdle. Businesses can use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes.



Get started for free.

Happy reporting!
The Data Studio team

*Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Data Studio

Announcing: Smart, Fast-Acting Analytics — For Everyone

This past March, we launched the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products designed for the needs of enterprise-class marketers in today’s multi-screen world. 

Today we have another exciting announcement. Next month we’ll start rolling out a new product: Google Optimize — a free version of our enterprise-class testing and personalization product, Google Optimize 360. Google Optimize will be globally available at that time. Additionally, we’re including enhancements to many of our existing free products. Read on for details.

Businesses of all sizes need tools to measure and succeed 

First of all, why this free product now? Because companies big and small face the same challenge today: Consumer expectations are higher than ever in a mobile-first world. How can brands be more useful to people in their moments of need? With ever more data flooding in, marketers need access to the right data so they can uncover useful insights — and act on them quickly.

The companies that are already making this leap from data to action are transforming their businesses by becoming more useful to consumers throughout these micro-moments. How? Analytics and testing are the key. In fact, according to an Econsultancy survey of 4,000 marketers, the top two digital trends in 2020 are going to be a focus on customer experience (24%) and personalization (23%).

That’s what has led to today's announcement. We've made several advancements to the free versions of our analytics products to bring modern measurement to everyone, and help them create happier customers by providing more relevant experiences. Let’s take a closer look.


  1. How can every business deliver personalized customer experiences?
    Google Optimize     (beta). This free web and mobile-web testing and personalization tool helps businesses improve their customer experiences and business metrics. Because it’s built on top of Google Analytics, businesses can use their existing information to experiment and personalize site experiences with minimal setup requirements. Request an invite.

"With Google Optimize, we’ve been able to provide more engaging content to The Next Web's readers – converting them from new readers to loyal customers."
Martijn Scheijbeler 
Director of Marketing - The Next Web



  1. How can everyone access and share powerful data?
    Google Data Studio     (beta), our free reporting and data visualization product, is now available globally in 21 new countries.* It enables businesses to easily spot and share insights, and collaborate to drive better decisions. Additionally, next month we’re launching report templates, making it even easier to get started. As with templates in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, businesses can create, edit, and use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes. Get started. The enterprise and free versions of Google Data Studio launched earlier this year in the U.S. These updates are also available in Data Studio 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.  



  1. How can everyone get useful insights, not just more data?
    Google Analytics    , our free customer analytics product and measurement centerpiece, analyzes customer data from all touchpoints — and soon it’s becoming even smarter. Following the launch of our automated insight stream in the Google Analytics mobile app, we’re excited to announce Session Quality Score: A new metric that incorporates machine learning to predict the likelihood of a visitor making a transaction (purchase) on your site or app. Businesses can use session quality score to provide better customer experiences and / or remarket to their most engaged website visitors. This feature is coming soon in beta and will also be available in Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.




  1. How can everyone gain full visibility into customer journeys?
    Google Tag Manager empowers marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. It offers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code), and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows. And today we’re greatly expanding our openness by integrating an additional 20 tags from Quantcast, Twitter, Microsoft Bing, Nielsen, and many more. See the full list of supported tags here. These updates will roll out over the next couple weeks and are also available in Tag Manager 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.




Modern measurement for everyone 

Put simply, that's our goal with these new free products. As today’s businesses are shifting to compete on customer experience and personalized marketing, we want to give all businesses the tools and access to compete — and ultimately, drive better online consumer experiences.

If you’re interested in learning more, please watch our blog this week and next. We’ll dive deeper into each product announcement and show you how they work. In the meantime, check out the resources below to learn more.
As always, you can visit our website to sign-up for our free analytics products.

*Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam

Posted by Babak Pahlavan, Senior Director of Product Management, Analytics Solutions and Measurement, Google