Wednesday, March 30, 2022
This article shows how to create a monitoring dashboard for your Search traffic on Data Studio. While Search Console provides out-of-the-box charts and filtering capabilities, Data Studio allows you to customize your own charts and view them side by side with other data, such as Google Ads, Analytics, YouTube, BigQuery, and others. If you missed our previous article in this series, check it out at Connecting Search Console to Data Studio.
Before we dive into dashboarding, we have some good news for Data Studio users: as of today, the Search Console connector includes data for Discover and Google News traffic, similar to the data recently added to the API.
In today's post, we're sharing a dashboard for you to use with your own data; it makes it easy to toggle between different Search Console properties, data types, devices, and more. You can link your own data to this template to monitor your site's Google Search traffic.
Keep reading to learn more about the dashboard.
How and why you should use a dashboard
When you build a dashboard, you should always start by defining its purpose, and the majority of cases can be classified as one of three options:
- Monitoring performance. Quickly discover a change in the data, for example monitoring URL clicks and click-through rate (CTR) for important pages on your site.
- Data exploration. Uncover insights from data, for example analyzing search performance patterns across different countries, devices, or website sections.
- Informing the world. Publishing interesting trends and patterns, for example sharing aggregate data segmented by industry.
Today we'll discuss a monitoring performance dashboard, which should help you find out issues as they happen. Usually, this kind of dashboard uses simple visualizations such as line or bar charts, and tables — those are quick to interpret. Then, if an issue is discovered, the SEO or analyst can proceed to a deeper data exploration (this will be covered in the next post).