Google Data Studio – Pictures slider
The 22th of October, Google Data Studio team added the option to create table chart with one row per page (the previous minimum number of rows was 5).
This was a small but expected feature option that allow users, as example, to create a simple dynamic text with one dimension value (removing the table header and not including metrics column).
When I spotted on Twitter this change inside Data Studio, I suggested also to use it as a way to create a pictures slider, like we can find in a lot of websites. This feature becomes a kind of convention for website homepage design, often for the bad, sometimes for the good.
Slider configuration
To create your slider, follow the steps below:
- Create a table chart
- Select your picture URL dimension or build it with a calculated field
- Display it as an image in the chart dimension option
- Remove the default selected metrics
- Change the number of row per page to 1
- Remove table header
- Remove row number
- Remove chart header
- Resize your chart following the reporting page and the size of the pictures
I applied these steps in the following video to create a slider displaying promotion banners of active internal campaigns: Let’s imagine that we collect data about banner impressions and wish to use it to provide visual context for selected dates range. This mechanism can be applied for analytics or display ads data as example.
Small aside: Websites navigation habits
Of course, I include this slider in addition to:
- my treemap navigation bar made to filter my report by traffic source channel
- “back to home” link added on the top left logo
- Footer link to access to report glossary
So, it is my new mimicry element of website conventions to create a smooth report reader experience based on already gained reflexes by users navigating in a browser.
Link addition
You can also add a link to your picture, to let report readers accessing to the related web page (as example, a page describing details about an active sales promotion). You just need to combine HYPERLINK AND IMAGE functions in the same calculated field.
HYPERLINK(<Dimension of the page URL>, IMAGE(<Dimension of Picture URL>))Other use case: Slider of top products
For an e-commerce website, we can also imagine to create a slider of best sellers, adding quantities sold as a legend of the product picture.
To do it, you just need to apply steps described for the previous example and add a metrics column with the good style (especially aligned at the left and with the good size).
