Weeknotes #10
This week Google Data Studio is reborn, the Digital Culture Network reaches a huge milestone and I chat to organisations in Bath, London and Newcastle.
A new name for Google Data Studio 👀
I’m a big fan of Google Data Studio. Alongside Tableau and Power BI, it is the data visualisation platform I recommend the most to cultural organisations as it’s easy to use and integrates really well with the common other platforms in use. Anything Google-related is free to link in (Google Analytics, Google Ads, YouTube etc) and there are connectors for almost anything else.
This week Google changed the name to Looker Studio 🤢.
Why do you ask? Why? Well way back in June 2019, Google acquired Looker, a data cloud ecosystem and have now merged their Google Cloud business intelligence (BI) products under the Looker name. (I hate it, I hate the name, blurgh). I’m interested to see what changes (or doesn’t change) now there will be a Looker Studio Pro version. Will functionality be held back?
Here is the intro from this week’s Google Cloud Next ‘22 event:
Digital Culture Network reaches 3,000 cases
A great milestone was reached this week, the Digital Culture Network recorded our 3,000th 1-2-1 support case. This number comes from 1,260 different arts and culture organisations and individuals over the last three years.
“I was absolutely blown away by the DCN offer - everyone I’ve spoken to in the network has been incredibly intelligent, helpful, kind and practical. They totally understand the needs, resources and problems of a small arts institution and have shared incredible advice, shared learnings, lead discussions and acted as someone to bounce things off when I hit a brick wall. I would like to recommend the Digital Culture Network to everyone - it’s truly an amazing resource and I can’t quite believe that it’s real and free! Thank you to everyone involved and particularly to those who I’ve worked with. ”
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Conversations this week
On Monday Emily and I caught up with Activity Stream again, this time with Dina Cravcenco (Head of Marketing) to talk about ideas for collaborative content and a tech demo.
Tuesday I was back with Jonny Goode and Dan Lamont from Blast Theory. Jonny has switched from Supermetrics to Porter for Data Studio (Looker Studio 🤮), saving over £1,000 in the process 🙌, and we finished off setting up Civic Cookie Control with a nifty “Change my cookies” option on the privacy page.
Wednesday was all about Ollie’s webinar, 5 reasons why you need a digital strategy in 2023. Ollie has written an accompanying article which explains the reasons and what you should think about.
Afterwards I had a great follow-up meeting with Bridie Tyler (Digital Communications Associate), Sarah Crompton (General Manager) and Camille Bensoussan (Executive Director) from Upswing Aerial. We talked through the different reporting needs for the organisation, and what data is suitable for each audience group.
Thursday I caught up with the brilliant Bath Festivals team again - Rosie Crocker (Marketing Assistant) and Jasmine Barker (Head of Marketing and Communications). They had outlined the core objectives and interactions they’d like to track through the website, so they set up and configured Google Tag Manager to pass new information to Google Analytics 4.
© Northern Print
In the afternoon I spoke to Andrew Hardie (Marketing and Digital Coordinator) at Northern Print, the centre for excellence in printmaking in the North East of England. Andrew is looking to gain additional insights about website users, so we set up a Shopify ecommerce integration with Google Analytics 4 through Google Tag Manager. We used the Shopify GA4 Kit from analyzify which seems to work really well. The great thing about the integration is it shows product view data, something I’d love to see from ticketing systems!
Finally on Friday I spoke to another Newcastle organisation, the wonderful Katy Vanden (Producer) at Cap-a-Pie theatre company. Katy has Google Analytics 4 up and running on the site but the video interactions were not tracking. The wraparound code from Wordpress is messing with the tracking, so we looked at a few solutions to get around it.
Have a great weekend everyone. Next week should be a fun one, I’m off to London to visit the National Theatre!