There are dozens of things like this now, so Google is pretty late to the game. I suspect that the play here is to keep people in the Google ecosystem by competing with Amazon on product offerings.
Having looked at a lot of these things, here's the criteria I use to evaluate these kinds of services -
1/ How easy is it to get data in?
2/ Is my data safe?
3/ How easy is authoring?
4/ Does it support pivots?
5/ Can I model joins?
6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters?
7/ Does it support complex time comparisons?
If a service checks those boxes, it's actually ready to get deployed. In the case of Google Data Studio:
1 - Seems standard. 2 - Doesn't use SSL, major red flag. 3 - [EDIT] seems decent, see demo in reply. 4 - Can't tell from the website or examples, red flag. 5 - [EDIT] it cant, see reply 6 - Many examples of this in the gallery. 7 - No examples, red flag.
I'd rate this as pretty mediocre. The people building these products tend to overrate flashiness of dashboards and lose focus on the actual workflow of analysts and those they are helping support. Most of the things I see in the gallery examples are great eye candy but mostly worthless for actually managing a business week-to-week.
Maybe it's different in other companies but I feel that an effective dashboard tells me:
- How I did (last week, trailing 30 days, QTD, YTD)
- ... relative to how I did before (vs comp time period)
- ... relative to my goals
- And a breakout of the drivers of that performance.
Pie charts of demographic breakdowns or measures from some arbitrary date range just aren't useful tools. They're something you look at once and then never revisit.
Having looked at a lot of these things, here's the criteria I use to evaluate these kinds of services -
1/ How easy is it to get data in?
2/ Is my data safe?
3/ How easy is authoring?
4/ Does it support pivots?
5/ Can I model joins?
6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters?
7/ Does it support complex time comparisons?
If a service checks those boxes, it's actually ready to get deployed. In the case of Google Data Studio:
1 - Seems standard. 2 - Doesn't use SSL, major red flag. 3 - [EDIT] seems decent, see demo in reply. 4 - Can't tell from the website or examples, red flag. 5 - [EDIT] it cant, see reply 6 - Many examples of this in the gallery. 7 - No examples, red flag.
I'd rate this as pretty mediocre. The people building these products tend to overrate flashiness of dashboards and lose focus on the actual workflow of analysts and those they are helping support. Most of the things I see in the gallery examples are great eye candy but mostly worthless for actually managing a business week-to-week.
Maybe it's different in other companies but I feel that an effective dashboard tells me:
- How I did (last week, trailing 30 days, QTD, YTD)
- ... relative to how I did before (vs comp time period)
- ... relative to my goals
- And a breakout of the drivers of that performance.
Pie charts of demographic breakdowns or measures from some arbitrary date range just aren't useful tools. They're something you look at once and then never revisit.