Free dashboards built on the profit exports — profit by day, and margin per SKU, beside the spend you already report on.
Overview
Most stores that want a profit dashboard without paying for another tool end up here, and there is nothing to buy: Data Studio is free, and the two CSV exports carry everything a margin report needs. What it will not do is fetch our URL by itself. That is worth knowing before you start, because it decides which of the two routes below you take.
How it works
Data Studio reads from sources it has connectors for, and a scheduled CSV over HTTPS is not one of them, its file upload is a manual, one-off upload. So something sits in the middle. A Google Sheet pulling the export with IMPORTDATA is the cheap route and fits the daily figures comfortably: at one row per day, even a two-year backfill is a few hundred rows. The per-SKU feed is a different size, a row per SKU per day and belongs in BigQuery, which Data Studio connects to natively and which will not struggle at that volume. We are planning to build a better integration for Google Data Studio and will notify account holders once it's done.
How to configure
For the daily figures: in a new Google Sheet, =IMPORTDATA("<your orders export URL>").
In Data Studio, add a data source, choose Google Sheets, and select that sheet.
For margin per SKU: load the products export into BigQuery on a schedule and add it as a BigQuery source instead.
Keep the Sheet restricted. The URL inside it carries your report key, so anyone who can open the Sheet can read that store's aggregates. Rotate the key if it gets out, it is separate from every other key for exactly this reason.
