Google’s Data Studio Just Got a Bit Better
Google’s Data Studio is a pretty sharp (and free) way to create dashboards and visualizations from your Google Analytics data and other data sets. But it’s always been limited in what it can do. However, the program has received some fun product updates in the past few months. My favorite new features are custom data range comparisons and the Tableau-esque ability to drill down in charts. So far, I’ve used this new feature to create more useful maps. Now, dashboard viewers can drill into details about which states and cities their users are located.
Ads, They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves
There is a growing interest in the idea of personalization and privacy in the online age. This caught the eye of the New York Times, who decided to conduct its own digital advertising experiment to show how far advertisers go to collect and use our information. My main takeaway is that we have a choice to make: either we all agree to be targeted by hyper-personalized ads that are more relevant to us or we need to create and pass more stringent data privacy laws.