Google Data Studio – Internal links
Let’s take care of the readers experiences inside Google Data Studio reports, using text links.
The article is based on a gif analytics tweet I’ve posted few weeks ago. The tip was based on text link filled with technical URLs of report pages.
From this moment, Google Data Studio team has enhanced text link feature, adding the option to select report page as text link destination:
- Dynamic page link : First, previous, next, last page regarding the current displayed page
- Page in the current report
Use cases
Let’s take into account this new feature to try to give details about my orignal tweet, through 3 use cases for a smooth report readers experiences.
Footer access to glossary
To avoid (same) questions from (…same…) readers about displayed metrics and dimensions in the report, I like adding a final page containing a specific glossary following the deployed Analytics measurement plan and the content of the report.
Let’s add in the report footer (so defined as report-level), a direct link to the glossary page, using “Last” dynamic page link.
Metrics tabs as advanced navigation menu
You can use text link to specific page to create a hard-configured menu inside your pages.
You can also play more with graphic styles, imitating web design conventions: Let’s create metrics tabs on a table widget, using the Google Analytics ABC model (Acquisition, Behavior, Conversion) for metrics grouping
- Create 2 duplications of your current table page, overflowed of metrics
- Curate and adapt the list of metrics on each page
- Create 3 text blocks and customize it to get a tab graphic rendering with an active state corresponding to each page
- Add page link to each concerned text block
and be careful about the text label (Google Data Studio changes automatically the text label to use the page name) - Apply again text styles to text blocks with page links
(because text styles has been changed as a consequence of link creation)
Back to home link on the brand logo
Clicking on company logo, displayed on the top left corner, to go to the home page is a web convention. Let’s do the same thing on our Google Data Studio report.
This tip is probably the most complicated to apply because we need to deal with limitations :
- For the moment, dynamic links are available only on static texts and not through Google Data Studio HYPERLINK function
- For the moment, links are applied to the text and not to the text block, it means that your text block must contain a text to apply the configured link
A solution exists to get around these limits :
- Create a text block with the same size and over your logo
- Fill it completely with “8” characters (our clickable zone)
- Copy the sequence of “8” characters
- Open the text link popin
- Select a “First” dynamic page link
- Paste the sequence of “8” characters as display text (replacing “First” default label)
- Apply the text link
- Select the text block and go to the the style tab
- Apply 0% of opacity to the background
(even if opacity is available on the background section, it is also applied to text) 😛 - Make the text block as report-level (like the logo)
Additional inputs
June 5, 2019 – Update
- For the moment, on edit mode, clicking on a page link opens it in the browser as a URL link, so it causes an error (ex: last/).
To avoid it and if you wish to edit this kind of link, click close to the link (not on it) and select the full text label with your keyboard. - If you duplicate your report to create a new one, all your page links will still work. In the same way, if you change the name of a linked page or add new page before, there will be fine. Page links seems to be based on relative paths of the pages report.
