Data Blending: Definition, Function & How to Do It

Have you ever heard of data blending? If you are a data analyst, this term might be familiar to you. 

Data blending is the process of processing data by combining data from several sources to formulate business decisions or drive certain business processes. 

In its process, a data analyst might use a visualization tool such as Google Data Studio also known as Looker Studio. 

In this guide, you will explore the details of the data blending process and how to blend data in Looker Studio to visualize your data.
 

What Is Data Blending?

As mentioned earlier, data blending is the process of combining and collecting data so that it can be visualized and analyzed. 

In general, companies will look for data from several sources to find answers to questions or compare data with each other. 

However, the collected data is usually still raw, so it will be difficult to understand if it is not reprocessed. 

Therefore, the presence of data visualization tools such as Looker Studio is very helpful to unify raw data from data analysis results, spreadsheets, company systems, cloud-based applications, and so on. 

For your information, Looker Studio is a free business intelligence tool released by Google to support the data visualization process, from graphs to tables, quickly and accurately. 

A common example of this blending process is combining two different data from Google Analytics 4 (GA4). It is a property designed to collect app data and analyze customer journeys. 

Google Analytics records that 44 million sites use Google Analytics and another 14.2 million use Google Analytics 4.
 

Why is Data Blending Important?

This blending process is conducted by combining two or more data. Through this process, you can obtain relevant information that might not be found without this process.

Therefore, we can say that this process speeds up the collection of data and helps with further analysis so that you can get more accurate answers. 
 

Data Blending Steps

Organizing this blending process might be complicated for some people, especially for first-timers. To avoid any mistakes, here are the steps that you need to know:

1. Data Collection

The first thing you need to do is collect data from several sources, whether non-cloud or cloud-based sources, social media, or worksheets such as Excel and spreadsheets.

2. Data Integration

After the data is collected, you need to combine it with Looker Studio or other data visualization tools.

3. Data Cleaning

The next step of blending data is data cleaning, where you need to sort out the data that does not match the preferred information. 

After sorting the data, ensure to process the remaining data optimally to provide more accurate analysis results.
 

How to Blend Data in Looker Studio

There are two ways to blend data in Looker Studio if you have data with the same join key, including:

Quick and Dirty

This method can combine data quickly with an estimated 1 minute working time. The following are the steps to do the quick and dirty method in Looker Studio:

1. Select two data from two tables by long pressing the Ctrl key and clicking on the two tables. Both tables will have the same join key.
2. Once the tables are joined, right-click and select the Blend Data option. After that, the tables will automatically merge into one. 
3. In case when doing the above steps, you don't find the blend data option, it means that the available charts cannot be combined. 
    

Complex Method

This method is more complicated than the previous one, but you have more control over the data. Here are the steps:

1. Click Resource, then click Manage Blended Data. 
2. Click Add a Data View.
3. Select the desired data in the pop-up. 
4. Click Add Another Data Source.
5. Select the join key on both data. 
6. Select the dimension you want to compare. 
7. Optimize the settings and click Save.
8. You can review the combined data by clicking on the data source. 

Then, how to combine data sources with multiple dimensions as join keys? You can do the steps below.

1. Open Looker Studio, and click Blank Report.
2. Select the data source to be combined (Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Sheets, or other sources).
3. If you’re using Google Sheets, select the file from the data list using the navigation panel. 
4. Read the instructions first before adding the file.
5. Click Resources, then click Manage Blended Data. 
6. Click Add a Data View.
7. A new page will appear where you can enter the required data sources. 
8. Select Join Keys, then drag and drop the keys. 
9. Name the blended data and review it before saving. 
10. Save the data by pressing the blue Save button. 

That is the explanation of data blending and how to blend data in Looker Studio. 

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