Google Data Studio is an analytics tool, first unveiled in March 2016 as a free component of Google Data Studio 360 - a paid-for product for data visualization and reporting. A year later in March 2017, Google makes it available for all small businesses for free.
For small businesses that don’t have the resources to pay for the enterprise version, Data Studio remains a viable option for data analytics and visualization.
Data Studio integrates a range of Google products and data sources to create interactive reports in one place. Users can create reports by collecting and combining data from Google Sheets, AdWords, BigQuery, YouTube, Attribution 360 and Google Analytics.
"To enable more businesses to get full value from Data Studio we are making an important change - we are removing the 5 report limit in Data Studio," said Google Data Studio product manager Nick Mihailovski.
"You now create and share as many reports as you need - all for free."
With the global roll out to more than 180 countries, Google also announced several improvements to the reporting and data visualization tool.
The first new feature, is Filters. The feature allows users to filter their data in more ways. It also eases users in reusing filters on multiple charts.
The next is the ability to apply Google Analytics segments to charts. With the new feature, users can see all of their Google Analytics segments in Data Studio, and apply them to any chat if they want to. Users can also update the definition of the segments in Google Analytics, and see the changes to apply in Data Studio.
Google also improved some of its most popular data connectors: YouTube, DoubleClick Campaign Manager and AdWords. The company added new dimensions and metrics, that include YouTube video title, DoubleClick Campaign Manager revenue and cross-environment conversions broken out by app, AdWords campaign ID, keyword quality score and more.
Google also announced a tighter integration with the Google Cloud Platform to enable faster data reporting with better functionality.
To make all of the features available at a good use, Google added a file upload connector type that allows users to upload up to 2GB of CSV data. This way users don't need to rely on on SQL or Google databases, enabling them to bring in data from anywhere.