I’d like to share with you a very nice and handy extension to Chrome, i.e. the Data Studio Auto Refresh extension. With this, you can have your Google Data Studio dashboards autorefreshing and auto paginating on a (remote) screen.

At my workplace we have one screen situated at the news desk. The screen previously showed a Data Studio dashboard with only one page. On this one page we showed the amount of registered users on our site, the NPS for our sites and the most recent comments on a feedback form on the site.

Following Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week about prioritising posts from family and friends over posts from pages, we realised we need to have a closer follow up for our Facebook posts as well. So I added a second page to the dashboard that shows Facebook reach and amount of engaged users:

Now the original page alternates with this page every couple of minutes. Thus the news desk can monitor the reach and user engagement of our Facebook posts and hopefully learn what makes Facebook’s algorithms tick. Over time we will of course need to conduct some proper analysis on the performance of the posts but for now this will give us some insight into the performance.

(This screen actually runs on a Raspberry Pi which I manage remotely as I sit on a another floor. Feels like playing with toys but is actually a very good and cheap solution to this simple need.)