As a data-driven marketer, you might be using Google Data Studio to combine and visualize data from Rival IQ, Google Analytics, HubSpot, and more. Whether you're using Data Studio to deliver reports to your clients, your team, or even yourself, our latest changes will make building Data Studio Reports using Rival IQ a little easier.

In this release, we’ve enhanced our Data Studio connector in a few ways to make your dashboards easier to build and faster to load. If you’re not using Data Studio, it’s Google’s cloud-based reporting platform that simplifies building reports from a wide variety of data sources.

🚨PLEASE NOTE, users with existing dashboards: You will need to re-authorize your connector to keep your existing dashboards working. Once you re-authorize once, all of your Rival IQ-based dashboards will return to functioning status. See the following screenshot for details.

To re-authorize your connector, visit the Data Studio Data Sources page, then choose any existing Rival IQ-based connector. From there, fill in your API key.

One-time setup for your API Key

 With this updated version of the Rival IQ connector, you’ll input your API key in the first step of your setup. From there, you’ll never need to input your API key again.

Landscape Selector

In the second step of the connector setup, you’ll now have access to a Landscape selector with all of your landscape names as choices. Choosing which landscape you’re connecting to is as simple as using this selector. Previously, you needed to copy your landscape ID from Rival IQ. You can also choose to let the landscape be overridden in your report, enabling you to create a single report with data from multiple landscapes. 

Summary Metrics (one row per company)

The Summary Metrics data set is the easiest way to get started reporting on your metrics from Rival IQ. In this release, the updates for this data set include using formulas to compute averages and ratios (e.g., engagement rate, engagement per post) directly within the connector. Now, regardless of how you slice or combine your data, you’ll get the correct answer without having to code your own custom metrics.

We also included a new “Days in Period” metric to help you calculate any additional “per-day” metrics you need to create.

Daily Metrics (one row per company per day)

Like the Summary Metrics improvements, the Daily Metrics data set now uses formulas to compute all averages and ratios.

New: Social Posts (top posts by engagement rate, one row per post)

If you show off top-performing social posts in your GDS dashboards, and you were feeling the need for speed, we’ve added a new data set to our connector! This new data set is fast, and in just a few seconds, it’ll return the 100 most engaging posts (by engagement rate) for the company/channel combination you select. Now, your report will stay snappy, even when covering time ranges of a year or longer.

Social Posts (all posts, one row per post)

This data set is similar to the existing version but with a few improvements. We’ve added more resolution (now, hour-level) to the published at timestamps to enable better sorting, timezone manipulation, and information display. We’ve also added a computed metric for the number of posts in your analyses.

Companies Filter

To simplify creating widgets focused on only your own company, we’ve added a companies filter to the connector. With it, you can easily switch between retrieving data for all of the companies in a landscape or just the focus company. Since you’re also able to override this setting on a per-widget basis, you can easily mix landscape and focus-company-only widgets in a single report.

Channel Filter

To help the performance of your reports that require post-level data, you can use the new channel selector to control the amount of data you’re pulling into GDS. Like the company filter, you can override this setting on a per-widget basis to facilitate widgets showing top posts from different channels all in one report.

Once you reauthorize, your data studio reports containing already existing Rival IQ connectors will continue to function with the release of these new features. However, should you refresh the fields in an existing connector (while editing the existing data source), you’ll need to repair/fix any widgets that were using fields we upgraded.

For more setup details, please see our full Data Studio Connector Setup Guide.