To create a useful dashboard for our report viewers, we must plan its structure beforehand. Dashboard planning is thus essential for successful and efficient implementation.
In this chapter, we will discuss how information hierarchy applicable to any business can be mapped to Looker Studio's hierarchy. This will enable us to plan and structure our dashboards more effectively.
As an example we will go through a dashboard planning scenario following the information and dashboard hierarchy discussed in the lesson. Particularly, we will see the process of outlining and constructing a Website Usability & Engagement Report and a section that shows data about 404 Pages.
In previous lessons, we created an e-commerce report and explored various built-in chart types. Today, let's talk about dashboard planning and data connectors. Later, we'll discuss data modeling, visualization, report interactions, sharing, security, and more.
When creating a dashboard, it's tempting to dive right in and start building. But if you want a truly useful and valuable dashboard, you should plan it in advance.
To plan a dashboard, you need to understand two concepts: information hierarchy and dashboard hierarchy. We'll look at how information is structured in a client's business and how a dashboard in Looker Studio is organized.
When creating a dashboard, you usually have a main subject in mind, like website engagement. Within this subject, you have different topics, such as video engagement, scroll depth, and page visits. For each topic, you'll want to present data that answers specific questions. For example, for video engagement, you might ask:
The information hierarchy consists of Subject, Topic, Question, and Answer (STQA).
Now, let's map this information hierarchy to a Looker Studio dashboard.