Data Studio dashboard for Adsense advertisers: GSC, Analytics and Link building

Data Studio is one of those hot topics we haven't yet tackled at Blogger3cero, but which more and more SEOs are using to monitor their own projects or those of their clients.

We're going to talk about Data Studio, and we're going to do it big.

It couldn't have been any other way than with my good friend Álex Serrano, CEO of The Corner Lab.

An SEO consultant who fights every day with clients of all kinds and uses Data Studio with the same skill as a samurai wields his catana.

With this post, you'll get a professional Data Studio template that will help you get better control of your Adsense niches.

They're all yours, buddy!

DinoRANK wanted to stop on the calendar "Blogger3cero summer 2020 guest authors".

and left us a coupon that you can use to try out the tool (with all its features) for the first month for only 5 euros. To do this, use the coupon : veranodino

(all lower case) during the hiring process.

Hello, it's a pleasure to be back on Blogger3cero, this time to write about a subject I love: Data Studio.

As you know, when it comes to SEO, it's essential to automate as much as possible and be able to extract metrics, data and conclusions effectively and efficiently. This applies to all types of SEO project, whether you're a consultant, blogger or have a niche...

That's why today I'd like to offer you a completely free Data Studio template that you can use right away in your projects, simply by making a few adjustments to adapt it to your websites.

Here you can view and browse the model before I tell you all about it.

Like it? Keep reading.

I'll take you step-by-step through what's in the template and how to adapt it. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

Who is this model for?

This is a Data Studio model designed primarily for analyze and measure Adsense niche websitesThis is true both for the subject of the report itself and for the various measurements and dimensions used.

However, out of the 4 pages of the report, only one is dedicated specifically to Adsense, although in reality these are just several metrics. The rest of the pages are valid for any type of website.

If you don't have any plans with Adsense, don't worry, this template can also work for you.coming soon. Simply delete the page containing the Adsense data from Google Analytics, or delete the Adsense graphics, and you're done.

What is the purpose of this model, and what can it measure?

The aim is to provide you with a dashboard where you can view website performance and evolution quickly and efficientlyboth in terms of general traffic (all traffic sources) and of referencing in particular.

See at a glance whether the evolution is positive in terms of visits, user behaviour on the website and performance in terms of Adsense revenues and other related measures.

But it goes further than that.

Many websites, whether Adsense, affiliate or other types of niche, have groups or themes very well defined within the site.

The aim of this model is also to see the evolution of each cluster separately.This enables us to compare them not only in terms of traffic and user behavior, but also to detect increases or decreases in traffic, the amount of revenue they generatethe Adsense CTR for each clusteretc.

It will also enable you to see the progress of any query for which you are positionedseparated by cluster, of course. A Ranking tracking tool using Search Console data and allows you to filter by keyword and even combine this filter with the landing page filter.

Finally, the report is also designed so that you can visualize how your link building strategy is evolvingin comparing these groupsnumber of links, link types (follow, nofollow, ugc and sponsored), anchor text types...

Sound interesting? Let's find out.

What do you need to use this model?

Using this template in your projects is easy enough if you have a few basic knowledge of Data Studio, even if you'll have to make a few adjustments to adapt the model to your projects (it wasn't going to be that simple).

If this is your first contact with Data Studio, it may be more difficult, but don't be discouraged, it's very intuitive and later I'll explain a few details so you can adapt this template to your needs.

You will need the following items to use the model:

• Google Analytics account : of course, but you'll also need to link the Google Analytics account of your choice (where the project is located) to Data Studio by creating the connection to the data source.
• Access to Google Search Console : to connect the property you want to use in the report. Remember that when you connect the Search Console data source, you're actually connecting two sources: Site Impressions and URL Impressions.
• Google spreadsheet : for the link building reportYou'll need a Google spreadsheet, but don't worry, you can also use the template I used for this report from Data Studio. All you need to do is make a copy and include your data. You'll then need to connect the Google spreadsheet to Data Studio.
• Modify, adapt and customize : although this model is designed to require as little modification as possible, you will need to make a few adjustments to run at 100 % and adapts to the project you're using it for. Most importantly: the filters I used to analyze cluster data separately. I'll explain this in detail later.

The step-by-step model

I'll explain what you can find in each of the four pages of the template, and how to adapt it to your project.

Page 1: Traffic

The data source which feeds this page is entirely Google Analytics.

The first thing you see on this page, at the top, are the filters that act on all page dataCountry, Medium, Device and, of course, date selection.

The data is always accompanied by a comparison with the previous period (if you wish, you can modify the comparison for the same period of the previous year, or whatever you like).

General data : here we have a series of measurements with general data on web traffic, whatever the origin of the traffic.

If you'd like to see them separately, you can use the Medium filter at the top of the page. In the general data, you can also see 4 Adsense-related metrics extracted from Google Analytics.

Note that your Adsense account must be linked to Google Analyticsas I explain in the Google Analytics for SEO course you can watch on SEOWarriors.

Data by cluster : In these blocks, of which there are 3 (three clusters) in this report, we see the same metrics, but in this case filtered. The filter for these metrics is a "Landing Page" filter. The filter means that only data from landing pages containing the URL "/pet names" are counted.

We do the same for all the other blocks in the other clusters. This allows us to see a distinct breakdown of traffic, behavior and, of course, Adsense performance for each cluster.

If you wish to add further blocks/clusters, simply copy and paste the elements and extend the report in pixels from the layout.

How do you adapt it to your project/website?

Clearly, this report with these filters configured wouldn't give you any results (unless you had the same URLs, which would be weird).

Once you have made the copy of the Data Studio report and connect your data sources (GA, GSC and Google Sheets), you need to do the following. Be careful, as this will also help you in the rest of the report pages:

1. Select the metric for which you wish to modify the filter.

2. Once selected, you'll see the Filter section on the right, with the filter already defined. First remove it from the cross and then "Add filter".

3. Filter configurationfirst give it a name. As the other pages also have filters, I recommend that you give them a name that you can easily identify later. For example, "Cluster [cluster name] GA".

You can then configure it. In this example, we include all URLs containing certain words (/cluster-random) and use "Landing page" as the Dimension.

The final configuration of these filters will depend at 100% on your website and what you want to measure. Perhaps instead of using "Contains", you should use "Begins with", "Identical to (=)", "Matches a regular expression"... For all this, you can consult this post published by Jorge Sáez.

It is also possible that you need to use more rules.

In this particular "/numbers-" group, two rules have been used:

Include > Landing Page > Contains > /names-

y

Exclude > Destination page > Contains > /animal-names

Why?

Because on the website I used, there are two clusters whose URLs contain "/animal-names-" . Excluding the cluster already analyzed in block 2 "/animal-names" would solve the problem.

That's why I say it will depend on each website.

Once you've created your own filters, they'll be saved and you'll be able to use them as you wish. apply them to any Data Studio graphic. Of course, you'll need to change the filter for each metric, one by one.

Another possibility is not to delete the filters provided in the template, but to so that you don't have to change the filters for each chart one by one. one. Just hover the cursor over a filter, and you'll see a kind of pencil and editing as I explained above.

Before going to the next page I would like to comment on another feature of the report which can be very useful and which I love.

If you click on one of the graph bars (on any page), the rest of the data in that group (because they all form a "group") will be displayed. is filtered and shows you the data for that day that you have selected in the bar chart. If you click on the bar again, the filter is deactivated.

In this bar graph, we have the sessions (bars) and Adsense revenues (dotted line).

Page 2: CMS performance

On this page, the data source is Search Console.

At the top, in this case, we have filter control for "Country" and "Device category", in addition to period selection.

In the general data section, we have the 4 Search Console metrics unfiltered, compared with the previous period. In the general data section on the right, we can see the Clicks, Impressions and CTR filtered by the 4 countries that generate the most performance on this website according to Search Console.

For filter by country in each measurement, we used the following filter:

When you edit your report, you can simply modify the filters and specify the country you prefer.

On this page, you'll also see the same 3 cluster blocks, but now with different metrics. Each of these metrics has the filter it needs with each cluster, as on page 1, but be careful, because is now a different data source, you will need to create new filters with Search Console.

For example:

"Cluster [cluster name] GSC

At the top right of each block, you'll see 2 filter controls. What does it do? You can filter the data in each block by query or by landing page, or by combining the two. This enables you, for example, to see the performance data for a single query or for several queries, or to see the performance of one or more landing pages in the cluster analyzed.

Heis important to know that each of these filter controls has the filter for the cluster in question, so when you set about adapting filters, you need to take this into account.

On this page, the bar graph measures the prints (bars) and clicks (dotted line).

The rest of the functions are the same as on the first page.

Page 3 : Keyword tracking

This page also uses Search Console as data sourcebut in this case, it's designed to function as a tool for tracking rankings.

We still have the 3 cluster blocks and in each of them a bar chart with the "URL Clicks (bars) and average position (dotted line) is included. By default, if the filters at top right are not applied in the block, the data in the bar graph corresponds to the whole cluster.

Using filters, you can choose a specific query and also change the date, in this case for this chart only. If you want to know how to create a rank follow-up like this one with Search Console and Data Studio, you can read this article.

On this page filters are also applied for each cluster. You'll need to modify them to suit your project. Don't forget to modify the filter applied to the "Query" filter control so that only queries linked to the cluster in question appear. The filters to be used are the same as those on page 3.

Page 4 : Creating links

The purpose of this page is to see at a glance your website's overall evolution in terms of backlinks and also to analyze the link profile of each cluster in a highly visual way.

The data source for this page is Google SheetsA simple, hand-created template that can be added to as new links are collected.

This template contains the following sections:

• Number of links
• Backlink (in this case, you must include the referrer's URL)
• Landing ref: the URL of your site to which the backlink points
• Anchor text type
• Type of link
• Date

Of course, column names are customizable. However, if you add or remove columns, you'll need to reconnect the Google Sheets data source and choose the columns from which to import the data.

Here's a resource if you have any doubts about connecting Data Studio to Google Sheets.

In this case, at the top of the report page, we only have the date selector, there are no other filters.

As for data already entered in Data Studio, in general data you will see the total number of backlinks obtainedand all those who are follow, nofollow, ugc and sponsored.

In the blocks of each cluster, we also have two circular diagrams in which you can see the link types in percentages and anchor text types (brand, keyword, domain...).

You also have a evolutionary graph of links for each clusterand you can hover over it to view data for a specific day. This chart, like all the charts on the page, is subject to the date selector in the top bar.

As for the filters for each cluster used on this page, we follow the same line of filters used on pages 1, 2 and 3, but obviously with the Google Sheets data source.

For example:

"Cluster [cluster name] Google Sheets".

How can I use this model?

The first thing to do is toopen this linkwhere the model is located.

You will now see the "Make a copy of this report.

The next thing to do is toadd your data sources:

4 data sources appear.

The first is Google Analytics, the second is URL Impressions (Search Console), the third is Site Impressions (Search Console) and the fourth is Google Sheets.

If the source you need is not already connected, you'll need to create it when you see the message "Create a data source and then connect the various data sources one by one.

IMPORTANT: When you've connected everything, don't panic, because in your copied report you'll see most of the graphs "broken". This is normal, as most graphs and elements have filters applied to each cluster.

Here, you'll have to modify the filters and adapt them to your own filters bit by bit, and the color of the report will be gradually adjusted.

Control template for creating links in Google Sheets

It is not mandatory to use this Google Sheets template, you can create your own, but if you need it, the visit.

You can also make a copy, keep it and adapt it to your needs. Note that if you change the column names, you'll need to modify some of the filters on page 4, for example those that allow you to count only follow, nofollow, ugc and sponsored links.

And that's all you need to know to use this Data Studio report. L'adapting to your project will take some time, but it's not complicated.Just take it one step at a time. Doing the report from scratch would take longer, I assure you.

I hope you'll find it useful, and that you'll be able to use it to perform faster and better analyses, draw the right conclusions and be able to develop your project by examining the data.