Tracking Data Studio Report Usage via Google Analytics

Did you know you can track your clients data studio report usage via Google Analytics?

Trackify recommend setting this up to see who is and isn’t using all those lovely dashboards you’ve set up!

To add tracking to your reports, follow the following steps:

Step 1

For this tracking we recommend setting up a new Google Analytics Account so you don’t risk skewing any existing data. Setup a new Google Analytics account here. We recommend excluding your personal IP address if you are responsible for building the dashboards. You can find out how to do this here.

Trackify recommend making the account name something recognisable such as ‘Data Studio Tracking’ and the website URL ‘https://datastudio.google.com’ as below:

Step 2

Once your account has been created - make a note of your property ID under Property Settings.

Then go over to your Data Studio report in ‘Edit’ Mode and click File > Report Settings

Enter your noted Property ID under ‘Google Analytics Tracking ID’

Click out of settings and this change will be saved.

Step 3

Test your setup by changing to ‘View’ mode in your Data Studio Report and watching your data filter through into Google Analytics Real Time Reports. If you’ve already excluded your IP address this won’t work but you can still test using Google Tag Assistant.

Step 4

As you can see above, the report URL is coming through as the page URL and the Report Name & Page Name is the Page Title.

I recommend having a standardised naming format for all of your Data Studio reports such as:

‘Client Name’ - ‘Report Name’

E.g. Auckland Barbers - Adwords Performance Report

This way you can easily create reports and filter by client name etc.

Step 5

Optional : Create a Data Studio report to see your top used Data Studio reports.

Here’s a free template designed by Trackify for you to use:

https://datastudio.google.com/open/1rvdMhSKFQR6mWZK6NfAVXh8LWQcl5q7m

Happy Tracking!

Google Data Studio Unique Events System Error

If you're using Google Data Studio for your Google Analytics reporting, it's likely you've logged in today and seen a system error for any widgets containing the 'Unique Event' metric:

Google Analytics have renamed the 'Unique Events' metric to 'Unique Dimension Combinations'.  To add to confusion, they've deprecated the api field and also created a new metric called 'Unique Events' which is calculated differently to the previous Unique Events metric.  For more details check out this post https://www.clickinsight.ca/about/blog/unique-dimension-combinations-udc

How To Fix This Issue

To resolve this issue and get your reports working again you'll need to refresh your report data source and update the metric in your widget.

Step 1 - Refresh Your Data Source

Firstly, in edit mode, click on the widget showing the system error and click on the pencil icon next to your data source:

Then click 'Refresh Fields':

Step 2 - Update Your Metric

Once the fields have been refreshed you will notice that the widget error and metric have updated as below:

At this point you will need to click on 'Invalid Metric' and select 'Unique Dimension Combinations' or 'Unique Events' depending on which metric you want to use:

Once you have selected your new metric your report widget should be working again:

You will need to carry out the above steps for all widgets showing this error.