Google Data Studio – Pivot table as filter control

June 6, 2019 - by Mehdi Oudjida

To go fast, Pivot table is a good solution to get filter control combining 2 consistent dimensions.

Of course, assuming that:

There is a strong correlation between the combined dimensions
The cardinality of values for each dimension is low (and so the pivot table displays easily all the combinations by default)

In the example below, I create a pivot table filter using page views of device categories and responsive versions. Responsive version is a simple Google Analytics custom dimension, collecting the width media version of the website grid design.

Google Data Studio - Pivot table as filter control

We can also use it for the following other use cases :

Traffic channels / cost model
User types / buckets of number of sessions
Product brands / product ranges
CTA wording / CTA colors for for multivariate testing
[UPDATE] Content categories / content targeted audiences for the Data Studio resources report made by the GDS hero, Sir Lee Hurst @Helpfullee
…

Pivot table configuration

Create your pivot table selecting the wished row and column dimensions, then, on the data tab:

Select the right metric; Page views in this example
Display the metric as Percent of total to get additional easy-to-ready information on the filter
Show grand total for rows and column to get intermediary sums
Sort row and column by dimension ascending, to not have to depend to metric state
Activate “Apply filter”