Cheapest Way to Connect Mailchimp to Data Studio [takes 5 minutes]

Although Mailchimp already offers analytics inside their platform, there are many reasons why you might want to get Mailchimp data into Google Data Studio. The most obvious of these is that you can get all of your data into one report, combining Google Analytics data with your Mailchimp email marketing data.

You can then use Google Data Studio to create powerful report visualizations, merging data from all of your different data sources. In this article, we will show you exactly what you need to do to get started doing that.

Read on to find out how you can get your Mailchimp email marketing data into Google Data Studio - in less than 5 minutes to boot.

Custom Connectors

Before we get into the details, let’s first understand the concept of custom connectors for Google Data Studio. By default, Google Data Studio provides a handful of connectors that allow you to bring in data - some examples of these are Google Analytics or Google Sheets. But once you want to bring in data from somewhere besides a Google application, you need to rely on a custom connector.

A custom connector is essentially a small software service that connects to a data source’s API and pulls that data into a Google Data Studio report based on whatever criteria the user sets.

Custom connectors are built by people in the Google Data Studio community who want to expand the options of data sources that people can bring into Data Studio, Most are paid rather than free software, since it takes quite a bit of effort to build up to the specifications that Google demands.

You can browse all of the different custom connectors that have been approved by Google in their connector gallery here.

Step 1: Pick the Custom Connector that’s best for you

Depending on the data source, there may be multiple connectors available - so you should be sure to research the different options. For Mailchimp, there are essentially 3 different options: Supermetrics, Power My Analytics, and our own Custom Connector that we created here at Epilocal.

Obviously we are biased, but here’s the key points that we think separate the three different connectors:

Power My Analytics is a data-warehouse solution, which means they take your Mailchimp email marketing data to their server first before sending it to Google Data Studio. This makes sense if you have lots of data sources you want to blend together before the data gets to your Google Data Studio report - but if that’s not the case for you, this is probably too heavyweight of a solution.
Supermetrics is more lightweight but still aimed at users who are looking to combine several different data sources. Their pricing is steep for one data-source at €49 / month and only begins to make sense if you can take advantage of their Pro-plan which is €126 / month for 33 data sources.
Our Mailchimp Data Studio Connector is meant to be the lightest weight and cheapest solution of all - our pricing starts at $6 / month (we have many other currency options as well) and we have a 14-day free trial. We don’t move your data to our server the way Power My Analytics does and we aim to be more affordable than Supermetrics for people who have less complex data needs.

Going forward in this article, we will show you how to connect your data with our Epilocal Mailchimp Data Studio Connector.

Step 2: Get Your Free Trial for the Epilocal Mailchimp Data Studio Connector

You can sign up for a 14-day free trial on this page.

You will be asked to sign-up for an Epilocal account and enter your credit card details. However, you will not be charged until your free trial is over. You can cancel at anytime.

By default, the connector will give access to the email address that you created your account with. If you access Data Studio with a different email address you will need to add this.

You can do this by logging into your account management page and scrolling down to subscriptions:

Click on Manage Users and then you can change your email address to the one that you access Data Studio with:

If you would like to have multiple users at the same time, we offer a Pro plan that allows you to do that.

Step 3: Add the Custom Connector as a new data-source in Google Data Studio

Now that you have started your free trial, you will open up Data Studio and create a new data-source.

This will bring you to the Google Data Studio Connector Gallery. Then you just need to find the Mailchimp by Epilocal connector and click on it.

Step 4: Set-up the Connector

Once you add the Mailchimp by Epilocal connector, you will be prompted to set it up.

First, you will give the connector permission to access your Google account. If you have multiple Google email accounts, pick the one that you used to sign up for your free trial.

Then you just need to connect your Mailchimp account to Data Studio. To do this, you will be prompted to log in to your Mailchimp account using your usual username and password.

Finally, you will select which data view you want to work with: Campaigns, Automations, or List Growth.

This is necessary due to the way that Mailchimp provides reporting data through their API. As a result, you cannot combine certain data views so you must work with these fields separately. You can still combine these fields on a dashboard by adding a different data source for each view.

We have provided a report template that you can use with the Campaign data view. To use this template, simply check the box that says “Use report template for new reports.”

After this step, you should see the “Connect” button in the upper right corner of Data Studio turn blue - your set-up is now complete and you just press this button to add your Mailchimp data as a data-source.

Step 5: Start using your Mailchimp data in Data Studio reports

Once your connector is set-up you will be able to browse all of the different dimensions and metrics that are available. Each one has a description so you can get an idea of what fields you might want to use in your report.

Now you can either start from a blank slate and begin building your own Data Studio report using Mailchimp data, or you can start with our free Campaigns template to get you going.

Wrap-up

That’s it - that’s all it takes to connect Mailchimp to your Google Data Studio account using the Mailchimp connector by Epilocal. You can now use all of Data Studio’s powerful visualization features with your Mailchimp email marketing data as well as mix and match with other sources such as Google Analytics and Google Ads.