With the Google Looker Studio integration, you have the possibility to create Month over Month reports easily, using visibility and ranking data from your AWR projects.
There are two ways of making the MoM comparison:
Compare two specific dates
This is usually preferred when you want to report the first or the last update of a month, compared to the previous one.
It's actually the default comparison behavior in AWR. However, when you have projects with more than one update each month, things can get a bit tricky when building the report. This happens because Google Looker Studio, like most 3rd party reporting solutions, use aggregation methods across multiple dates.
Let's look at an example where we have a weekly updated project in AWR, pushing data to a GDS report with a default date range of 30 days. To compare just two dates, we would need to use custom dates in GDS:
Fixed dates - setting fixed dates is the most straightforward way for showing the month over month comparison, because you get to pick the exact update dates from AWR that you want to report.
There are two aspects to keep in mind however when using this option:
fixed dates break automation in regards to the report data refresh, thus each month we would have to choose the specific dates for your report
if we set the fixed dates at widget level, but we also have a date range selector on the report pages, this option will invalidate the date range selector (e.g. if the report viewer chooses a different interval, widgets with fixed dates will not update the values accordingly).
Dynamic dates - this actually resolves one of the Fixed dates inconveniences, as the data will be refreshed automatically based on the latest updates available in AWR. So, for a weekly project, we would set the Custom date range to Last week ("include today" checked) and Compared to date would be set to Advanced - Today -30 / Today -37 days.
Compare averages
In this case, we're comparing a month's average across four or five weekly updates, to previous month's average. This type of comparison is possible only with 3rd party reporting tools at the moment, and Google Looker Studio is one of them.
Let's look at the same example, were we have a weekly updated project in AWR and the default date range of the GDS report is 30 days. In this case, we would set the Default date range to Last 30 days ("include today" checked), and Comparison date range to Previous period.
Using this option, the values that we will have in Data Studio will be different from those in AWR, as these will be computed according to the aggregation method that we choose.
For example, if we're using Average for a scorecard showing the Visibility percent metric from AWR, then the value in GDS will be computed as the 30 day average of the Visibility percent values that were recorded for each weekly update in AWR.
Do you have any other questions? Don’t hesitate to get in touch and we will keep building the FAQ.