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Google Data Studio Connector Guide
Google Data Studio Connector Guide

Pull your Rival IQ metrics and posts into Data Studio to customize how you present your data.

Seth Bridges avatar
Written by Seth Bridges
Updated over a week ago

What is Google Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is a reporting and dashboard that "turns your data into informative dashboards and reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable." You can learn more from Google on their Data Studio page.

If you are familiar with building reports using tools like Tableau or PowerBI, you'll feel right at home in Data Studio. With live connections to Google Analytics, Search Console, and now, Rival IQ, you'll be able to build live dashboards for your clients and teams.

Getting Started

To get started creating your first report, you need to set up your Rival IQ Data Studio connector.

Once you click this link, you'll set up your first instance of our connector. To do this, you'll need your API key. 

To find your API key, go to your Profile page in the Account Settings and then click the button 'Create API Key'. After it is created you can copy and paste it into the configuration page. Please see the images below for the location to retrieve and paste the API key.

Once you've found your API key, insert it into the data source configuration page.



At this point, you have a few more decisions to make, including which landscape you're connecting.

The first choice in this setup dialog is the Data Set. Here, you have four choices, and depending on what you're trying to build, you'll need to grab the right one. Note: depending on the complexity of what you're building, you might even need to create multiple data sources from this connector using different data sets.

Summary Metrics (one row per company) will give you access to aggregate social and SEO metrics, with one row of data per company that covers the entire time period. Our summary metrics API documentation has more details on which metrics are available.

Daily Metrics (one row per company per day) will give you access to aggregate social and SEO metrics, with one row of data per company per day. Our time-series metrics API documentation has more details on which metrics are available. If you are looking to make time-series graphs, this will be the way to go. Please note: if you are aggregating over time periods that are longer than one day, you will need to create calculated fields for rate and average metrics.

Social Posts (all posts, one row per post) will give you access to the post-level data, including engagement metrics, message, and metadata like published date. There is one row of data per post. Our social posts API documentation shares all of the details about which metrics are available.

Social Posts (top posts by engagement rate, one row per post) is helpful for creating widgets that display a set of the most engaging posts in your landscape. It returns the top 100 posts by engagement rate descending. This small amount of data means it is very fast to load but please note that it isn't all of the posts in your landscape. If you're looking to compute totals/aggregates on all of the social posts in the landscape, please use the Social Posts (all) data set.

Please note: you can connect to multiple of these data sets in a single report, but you'll have to set it up a new data source for each.

Other Required Setup Options

Company Filter

To simplify creating widgets focused on only your own company, we’ve added a company 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. 

A Few Other Helpful Tips

Pro-tip 1: name your connector something meaningful so that you can remember what it is within a report. Also, you can re-use these configured connections in multiple reports. Having good names will help you pick the right ones.

Pro-tip 2: you can access previously configured connections to use again in new reports. Find them in your Data Sources screen within Data Studio.

Building Your First Report

Once you have finished connecting your data source, you're ready to go. For this example, we've used the Social Posts (all) data source.

Let's build a bar chart showing the total engagement for social posts, with one bar per company, and stacked by channel.

First, draw a bar chart on the report. Our defaults will use Engagement Total as the metric.

Now, to color by channel, add a dimension, and choose 'Channel.'

In the bar chart properties, go to the Style tab and select 'Stacked Bars'.

To pick your date range, you can use the Report settings and override their default with a custom time period.

You've just built your first custom visualization! Congrats. :)

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