Google Data Studio

Avantages

I love how easy it is to put the data points into different graphs and visualizations. The UI is typical of Google. Super intuitive and user-friendly and most aspects of the product behave exactly as a user would expect (which isn't the case in my experience for softwares like Tableau). Ease of use is by far what makes Google Data Studio stand out among the crowd.

Inconvénients

Can be hard to integrate data with certain platforms if they aren't Google owned platforms. There's also minor functionality gaps around not having all of the relevant google ads dimensions and labels accessible within data studio.

Avantages

Extremely user friendly. Setting up the dashboards was simple. You have control over almost every detail, including the layout and design. This is unlike many data platforms I've used in the past. ALMOST everything is totally customizable. This brings in all your Google/Youtube data automatically (including Google Sheets/docs). It also lets your bring in images, links, and other assets. You can change the data range filter easily for all metrics. The dashboard also is easily shareable to all team members and you can export the dashboard to a PDF.

Inconvénients

The connectivity to other platforms is disappointing. In order to automatically bring in your social media data or data from other sources (such as digital advertising or 1st party ecommerce data) you need to purchase a "connector". However, there are ways around this if you export your data from your other sources and just put this in a Google Sheet and connect that sheet to your Google Data Studio.

Avantages

I like that it's free and the templates available do a lot of the early set up for you. It's nice to be able to replicate these dashboards across accounts. Both for Google Ads and Analytics.

Inconvénients

I wish that it could pull in data from more sources (i.e. Marketo, Hubspot, Sharpspring, Yelp, etc). Also, I wish there were more template options, such as templates for community management dashboard or FB/Instagram ads.

Avantages

GDS is free and that is its greatest strength. It connects easily to Google services, and supports a smattering of other data sources. It is easy to use and has some power under the hood that isn't obvious at first blush, especially with recent updates that permit better data aggregation and transformation.

Inconvénients

It is very good for relatively simple dashboards, but if you are looking for larger scale "enterprise" tools or want more flexibility in data management, it's probably not a good fit. Maintenance of dashboards is highly manual and it is nearly impossible to create template reports or duplicate them for other similar data sources.

Avantages

I like the ease of use of their APIs to connect multiple sources of data together. We use this in conjunction with Funnel.io and we get all our data in one place to make monthly reports.

Inconvénients

Sometimes it takes FOREVER for data to load. As well, to make reports look pretty they use a weird grid system to align things but it's rarely accurate so you might have some graphs that aren't aligned by a pixel or two.