Google Sheets, Data Studio, BI or BigQuery?

One of our most frequently asked questions that we get is regarding the benefits and use cases for each of our products. Let me provide an overview to help solve that question.

DATASLAYER + GOOGLE SHEETS

This is our most popular product and its core purpose is to grab data from Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Facebook and more than other 40 marketing platforms, to place that data into Google Sheets. If you are not familiar with this use case, it is set to become your biggest time saving play for 2022.  With this tool you remove the need to export data manually from those platforms, and also remove the manual merge of the data to report on the various digital media that you are using.

To set up a data grab you just need to use our sidebar app in Google Sheets, this will grab the data into a tab in your desired layout. Then, repeat and grab data from another platform, and again as needed. Once you have the various data grabs set up, you can proceed to merge and format the data as you would for a dashboard in Google Sheets The best bit is that you will not need to repeat this set up process when you need the same report refreshed a day or week or month later.  You would simply refresh the data grab and Dataslayer will get the latest data to feed your formatted report.

This product is a perfect fit for reporting and creating dashboards with endless possibilities, being able to pull data up to 5 million cells (Google Sheets’ limit).

Top tip: Set up scheduled data refresh using our tool and feed tables in Google Slides from Google Sheets, to never have to build a month end slide report again!

PROS

CONS

• More advanced and detailed reporting (up to 5M rows)
• More economic plans
• All Google Sheets’ features
• More complicated to build dashboards

DATASLAYER + GOOGLE DATA STUDIO

Many digital marketers use Google Data Studio to build more visual dashboard reports. It’s a great tool that has native integrations with other Google platforms to enable quick and easy reporting.  But what happens when you want to bring Facebook or LinkedIn or Snapchat data into these same dashboards? With no native integration the options are:

1. Get the Facebook, Tiktok etc data into a Google spreadsheet (either manually or with Dataslayer for Google Sheets, see above) and then use the native integration with Google sheets or…

2. Use Dataslayer for Data Studio! 

Dataslayer for Data Studio is an easy to use api connector that brings all the metrics and dimensions from your favourite marketing platforms (see our latest connector list) into Data Studio. For a flat monthly fee of $75.65 you can remove the boring manual processes of getting the data on a daily or weekly basis and set yourself up for automated hassle free data integration, directly into your Google Data Studio Dashboard.

PROS

CONS

• Easy to build dashboards
• All Google Data Studio features
• Daily schedule refresh from the smallest plan
• Too simple
• Less detailed reporting (100 rows limit on dashboards)
• Can´t use Google Sheet´s advanced features

DATASLAYER + API QUERY MANAGER

When you have millions of data registrations and need a quick response, the Dataslayer API Query Manager gives you the possibility to bring data from multiple sources to the business intelligence platform of your choice like Power BI, Tableau, Qlik or other platforms supported by JSON. Extract clean data from your marketing platforms and store them into your go-to data visualization or BI tool within minutes.

With the Dataslayer API you and your team will be able to spend more time on what matters: grow your business. Now you can start automating your reports so your decision process will speed up helping you make the right decision every time.

PROS

CONS

• Advanced reporting
• Quick response
• Indicated for data scientist
• Perfect fit for Business Intelligence platforms
• Needs advanced training

DATASLAYER + BIGQUERY

Thinking of building a data lake with all your marketing data in one place? Dataslayer will solve the automatic collection of data from over 40 commonly used marketing platforms. Dataslayer is an enterprise grade api that is designed to collect all metrics and dimensions from all the core marketing platforms on an hourly basis.

Already used by over 100 blue chip businesses for over 4,000 marketing data points, we remove the time and hassle of maintaining API from marketing platforms so that you can concentrate only on the analysis.
With Dataslayer for Big Query you can import millions of cells and have advanced options like blending different data sources and Machine Learning. But what this product differs most from the other three is that you are not just copying data into another platform, you get the ownership of the data imported to be able to manage it as you like and make better business decisions.

PROS

CONS

• Merges different data sources
• Along with Data Studio is the perfect reporting tool for international companies
• Easier to use for maketers
• Ownership of data
• Is not free
• Not needed unless you have millions of records