Guide

How to understand your launch monitor data

You booked a bay, or you’ve got a launch monitor at home, and you hit balls for an hour. At the end you’ve got a screen full of numbers, or a CSV full of them, and a quiet feeling of: now what?

Most golfers never get past that feeling. The numbers sit there, the app shows a few dispersion ovals, and nothing really changes about how you practise. That’s not your fault. The data is useful; it’s just that nobody shows you the step between “here are your numbers” and “here’s what to do about them”. This guide is that step.

The mistake almost everyone makes with their data

The instinct is to stare at your worst shot. You hit one 30 yards right, and you spend the rest of the session, and the drive home, trying to work out what went wrong on that one swing.

That’s backwards. One bad shot is noise. The thing worth knowing is the pattern: across all your swings, what did your good ones have in common that your bad ones didn’t? Good coaches don’t chase individual misses. They look at the shape of the whole session and fix the thing that’s quietly costing you the most, most often.

Your launch monitor already captured everything needed to see that pattern. It’s all in the session. It just isn’t arranged in a way that shows it to you.

Your good shots leave clues.

Every good shot you hit left a trail in your numbers: the face, the path, the speed, the strike. Your bad shots left one too. Take the same session and split it: your ten best strikes against your ten worst, your most centred contact against your most off-centre. Line them up and the clues start to show: what you did on the good ones that you didn’t do on the rest.

That’s the thing to work on, because it’s a change you’re already capable of making. You did it on your good swings. You just need to do it more often.

Following those clues is the whole shift. Everything below is how you actually do it.

Step 1: Get the session out of the machine

Your data is only useful if you can keep it and read it, and this is where a lot of people get stuck. The launch monitor apps don’t make it obvious.

The short version: export your session as a CSV file from your launch monitor’s app or software. On a rented or range TrackMan, the session runs on the venue’s computer: sign in to your own TrackMan account if the bay lets you, and ask the bay or your coach to export the session as a CSV before you leave, or you go home with nothing.

The exact taps differ for each device, and we keep step-by-step guides for each one so you don’t have to guess:

• TrackManExport from TrackMan Performance Studio
• Garmin R10 / R50Export from the Garmin Golf app
• SkyTrak+Export from the SkyTrak app
• GSProExport from GSPro’s Practice Range

One thing worth knowing now, so you capture the right data: to see why your good shots were good, the file needs your club numbers (club speed and path), not just the ball’s. Many launch monitors measure them; some need a setting, a membership or club stickers switched on. Why a file can have ball data only.

Step 2: Do you need to tag your shots?

“Tagging” trips a lot of people up, partly because it means two things. One is telling the launch monitor which club you’re hitting. That’s worth doing at the bay, because it keeps your clubs apart in the file, and if you forget, you can still say which club it was afterwards. The other is naming your swings as you go (“stock”, “punch”, “three-quarter”), as TrackMan’s tags do. That’s optional.

You don’t need to tag swings religiously to analyse a session afterwards. The club and shot data are all in the exported file, and a good analysis groups the shots for you. So tag if it helps you stay organised at the bay, and don’t let not tagging stop you: the session is still fully readable later.

Step 3: Turn the numbers into a pattern

This is the step the launch monitor app skips, and it’s the one that matters. With your exported session, you want to answer three questions:

1. Which shots were my good ones? Sort the session and separate your best from your worst: by strike, by face, by path, by speed.
2. What did the good ones do differently? Line those groups up against each other and look at what actually changed. Usually one thing stands out (your good shots came with a shallower path, a squarer face or more centred contact), and that’s your signal.
3. What’s the one thing to work on? Not five things. The single change that separates your best from the rest, so your practice has a target.

You can do this by hand in a spreadsheet (sort, filter, group, compare medians), and if you like that sort of thing, it genuinely works. It’s just slow and fiddly, and most people won’t keep doing it session after session.

Step 4: Take one fix to your next session

A pattern you don’t act on is just trivia. Once you know your one thing, say your misses come from an out-to-in path, the point is to turn it into something you can feel on the range: a setup change or a feel, and a simple way to check next time whether it’s working. Then you hit again, export again, and see if the pattern moved. That loop of read, fix and check again is how data actually lowers your scores, rather than just describing them.

The shortcut

Everything above is doable by hand. We built LaunchtoPin so you don’t have to.

You drop in the same CSV your launch monitor exported, with no tags and no setup, and it does Step 3 and most of Step 4 for you: it sorts your session, puts your best shots against your worst, finds the one thing separating them, and gives you a fix with setup changes and feels to try next time. It reads TrackMan, Garmin R10 / R50, SkyTrak+, Square and GSPro files today, with more coming. Your first results are free, with no sign-up.

If you want to know exactly which files work, how many shots you need, or what happens to your data, the FAQ covers it. If you just want to see what your good shots did differently, create your report.

Your best swing is already in your data. This is how you find it.