Social networks allow people to connect to and interact with others and share content. The measurement and tracking of social KPIs can play an important role in driving your digital strategy.

This article aims to guide you through the process of setting up a Looker Studio report with your organic social data. Note that before getting started in Looker Studio, you must first complete a few steps inside Funnel. Refer to this article for a step-by-step guide on how to get the necessary data inside Funnel before moving on to Looker Studio.

We are going to cover the below concepts, meaning it will hopefully also be a great learning opportunity:

Since this is a full rundown of the use case, we expect it to take around one hour. So sit back, brew your favourite coffee/tea and let's get to some insights.

Start inside your Funnel workspace.

The best way to connect the data is by creating a Looker Studio View. Once you have created a view it's as easy as clicking a button to create a new data source in Looker Studio using that view.

Below is a list of the fields that are required for this dashboard to work, make sure to add them all in the view. You can of course add any other fields that you might want to use in addition.

In this example, we have called our Looker Studio data source Social Organic View Funnel, feel free to name it however you want but for reference purposes, we will use that name. E.g. <My Company> Social Organic View

Make sure your view has all the mentioned fields, and that you have created the Looker Studio data source, e.g. '<My Company> Social Organic View', before moving to the next steps!

We need to perform some data preparation operations in Looker Studio before we are ready to use the data in the visualization.

Once you have created the Looker Studio data source, you need to edit that and add the below fields.

The field Social Organic Post Created Date is of type string, to use this field to visualize when a post was created we need to convert this to a type Date. This can be achieved by using the formula as shown below:
​"PARSE_DATE("%Y-%m-%d", Social Organic Post Created Date)"
​

Tip: If the field Social Organic Post Created Date from Funnel is of type "Date", then step 3.1 is not needed. It is only mandatory if the dimension type is created as a type string.

Remember the Social Organic Post Created Date, to use that as a Date dimension in Looker Studio, we need to create a source which is called Extract Data. Extract data creates a snapshot of your data for a period of time, which can then be used in the reports and also lets you use any date field as a date dimension for that widget.

Once selected, your Data Extract connector should look like the below, with all the highlighted fields selected.

After following all the previous steps you should end up with two new Looker Studio data sources, one a direct connection from Funnel, and another of type Extract Data. Make sure you have these before proceeding.

Now you are ready to start using Funnel's Organic Social Media Overview template and make it your own. There are many different ways you can use this template e.g. 1) Make a copy and then replace the data sources, or 2) Create a report from a template.

We recommend using Create a report from a template as this gives you the option to use your data and preview it in a finished report. Then you can Edit and Share this report with others in your organization.

Since we have already created our Looker Studio data sources before, we can use them

Now you are ready to edit and share this report!

Great that you made it this far, you are an organic social media Jedi! If you want to go further, then you can visualize metrics such as net new followers which uses Looker Studio blends.

Hope this guide was helpful, we would love to hear your feedback. Happy reporting!