Scheduled Reports

When setting up scheduled reports, you define things like:

• Scope of data
• Filters (traffic sources or campaigns)
• Time range
• Time of day (at what time the report should be updated)
• Email addresses

When you request a scheduled report, Voluum will start processing data. Once it finishes, all email addresses defined during setup will receive an email with a link to a downloadable CSV file with requested data. Then, at the set time of day, the file under this link will be updated with new data regularly.

The recipient of Scheduled Reports can get three types of emails:

• SUCCESS (report available for download)
• EMPTY (the report is empty)
• ERROR (an error occurred and it was not possible to generate the report).

Scheduled Reports are a part of the Advanced Reports feature. To set them up, follow the steps below:

1. In Voluum, click the Advanced button.

   

2. Click the Select button under Scheduled Reports.

   

3. Set up time zone and time range settings and (optionally) campaign and traffic source filters.

   

4. Set grouping options.

   

5. Name your report, set sending schedule and provide one or more email addresses that you want the report to be sent.

   

6. Click the Request button.

You can view Scheduled Reports that you have set in Settings / Advanced reports tab.

From there you can:

• Check the details of the report:

  • Report name
  • Generation time (selected in the form)
  • Report for (filters such as traffic source, campaign, country)
  • Groupings (selected in the form)
  • Time range
  • Last update
  • Report URL (activation results in downloading the most up-to-date CSV file)
  • Email/s to which the report URL was initially sent
• Delete the report
• Copy the link to the CSV file

Scheduled Reports can be used as a data source for data analysis and visualization tools such as:

• Google Looker Studio
• Tableau
• Microsoft Power BI

All these tools have their strengths and the setup process differ but there are some things you should consider anyway.

We offer a managed service where we help you connect your reports with Google Looker Studio. We have dashboard templates that we can adjust according to your needs an automatic solution that uploads the CSV file from a scheduled report to Google Cloud. We offer:

• Assisted setup that will require no developer knowledge from your side.
• Customizing dashboard to your needs.
• Accommodating for more advanced needs, such as blending several scheduled reports into one data source.

Contact us to get more information.

If you want to set up custom dashboards on your own, you need to consider the following factors:

• There’s a limitation of 4 dimensions per 1 scheduled report. It means that preparing a report with more dimensions needs at least a few scheduled reports. The data from separate reports can be blended on the tool level, but you have to add a common dimension that will be the key when blending data (the best option is to use Campaign ID for this purpose).
• If you want your scheduled report to contain the exact metric (e.g. custom conversions), you have to add it to the report view before setting up Scheduled Report. The CSV file will have values in the same order as in Voluum panel.
• Bear in mind that the size of the Scheduled Report may vary on what dimensions you choose. For example, setting up dimensions like “Day - Hour - Campaign ID” will output more rows than setting up "Month - Campaign ID", however the first one will be more detailed for analytic purposes. This may be critical especially for Looker Studio which doesn't accept files over 200 MB. In general, you should prepare a less granular Scheduled Report for longer time ranges (e.g. 2-year) and more granular for the recent history (e.g. last month).

There are some things to consider before connecting Scheduled reports as a data source in Google Looker Studio.

• Google Looker Studio accepts data from Google Cloud. You can use Zapier-like service such as Make.com to automatically upload a scheduled report to Google Cloud. You can also upload the CSV file to Google Sheets and use a connector to use this spreadsheet in Looker Studio as data source.
• You can upload CSV file manually. Note that you would have to repeat that process every day, as the native 'File upload' option in Looker Studio won't refresh your data.
• Supermetrics has a connector that enables fetching data from a link to a CSV file.

The following guide will use the Google Cloud Upload method.

Set up data source in Looker Studio

1. Get Google Cloud source path.

2. In Looker Studio, create a new dashboard.

   

3. Click on 'Add a Data Source' when creating a new dashboard or click '+Add Data' button on the main bar.

4. Select 'Google Cloud Storage' from the list of Google connectors.

   

5. Provide the target path for your Scheduled Report data in Google Cloud and leave checkbox unchecked.

   

6. Click the 'Connect' button. Repeat the process of adding data sources if necessary.

Prepare visualizations

1. To add a new element on the dashboard, click on ‘Add a chart’ dropdown and choose the visualization type.

   

2. Available fields may vary on the chart type that you’ve chosen, but in general everyone has the following.

   

   • Data source - choose the data that chart is based on (e.g. specific Scheduled Report or blended data based on a few Scheduled Reports)
   • Date Range Dimension -choose which column in added Scheduled Report represents time range.
   • Dimension(s) - select the dimension for the chart.
   • Metric(s) - add metrics for the visualization.
   • Sort - select dimension or metric that will sort the data on the chart.

• Single CSV file placed on Google Cloud cannot be greater than 200MB. In the other case, Looker Studio won’t add the file as data source.
• The data freshness span is 15 minutes, please bear in mind that especially in debugging (sometimes you need to wait for 15 minutes after making change like refreshing data source).
• You cannot mix the dimensions and metrics in one calculated field.

Connection:

• Google Looker Quick Start guide
• About data sources in Looker Studio
• Connecting to Google Cloud Storage
• Data source editor

Report features:

• Data types
• Data blending in Looker Studio

Microsoft Power BI is considered to be one of the easiest data visualization tools to set up, as it can automatically pull data from a link to a CSV file.

Set up Scheduled Reports as a data source in Microsoft Power BI

1. Get Scheduled Report URL.

2. In Power BI desktop, start with new report and click 'Get data' and then select 'More'.

   

3. Select 'Other' and then select 'Web' connector and click the Connect button.

   

4. Paste the Scheduled report lin and click the Ok button.

   

5. Select the full link to the CSV file from the drop-down menu and keep ‘Anonymous’ setting on the left menu. Click the OK button.

   

6. Select the UTF-8 as the file origin.

   

7. When the file is loaded correctly, the report should appear in the right menu in Data section.

   

Setting up automatic data refresh

1. Log in to the browser version of Power BI and upload the file that you have saved before in ‘My Workspace' section.

   

2. Go to the data set and click the Schedule refresh option.

   

3. In the Refresh section, enable the data refresh schedule option and set time and frequency of refresh.

   

The following setup with Tableau uses a scheduled report being uploaded automatically to Google Drive as a source of data. You can use external connector services for that.

1. Create a new dashboard in Tableau.

2. Click New and select Published data source.

   

3. Go to Connectors and select Google Drive.

   

4. Grant all necessary permissions.

   

5. Select a scheduled report file.

   

6. Publish the report by clicking Publish in the top-right corner.

   

7. Provide a name for this data source.

   

8. In the project view, click New and then Workbook.

   

9. Select the data source you have just added.

   

10. Now you can build visualizations in Workbook using available widgets.