10 Advanced Reporting Formulas to Supercharge Google Data Studio Dashboards

Marketing data analysis and visualization has never been easier, using custom fields and dimensions

Lazarina Stoy
11 min readMar 4, 2022

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Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

In the following guide, I will go through the 10 Must-have custom dimensions in Google Data Studio for marketing data analysts.

For each example, I’ll give you a use-case, and also break down how and why to use and visualize this custom dimension in your marketing Data Studio dashboards. I will also touch upon how a Case statement formula can be used for basic data filtering, as well as advanced calculations when combined with different conditions.

1. Extract the Brand name from a URL dimension via a custom field

When doing competitor analysis at scale or SERP analysis, it will be very useful to visualize your data in a user-friendly way. One such instance would be to trim the URLs you have ranking for a particular set of queries, down to the brand name, in order to visualize Share of Voice per competitor.

In order to do this, you should create a custom dimension using the formula below, titled ‘brand name’

Here is the formula you need to use for this, as illustrated in the Screenshot above. You can replace the URL dimension with any dimension from your data source that contains a URL or web address.

TRIM(REGEXP_EXTRACT(REGEXP_REPLACE(REGEXP_REPLACE(URL, "https?://", ""), R"^(w{3}\.)?", ""), "([^/?]+)"))

2. Extract Top-Level Directory from a URL dimension via a custom field

Extracting the top-level directory can be something useful, not only when analyzing your own website, but also for doing competitor or SERP analysis. It might be useful to find out exactly how your competitors are structuring their top-level directors in the terms that matter to you, and whether there are some insights to be gained from them.

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Lazarina Stoy

talks about freelancing, productivity, marketing, and data science • Organic Marketing & Data Science Consultant, Speaker, Leader • also see lazarinastoy.com 🌊