Overview
What is Looker Studio?
Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
Best Analytical tool
Great platform to generate visually-appealing data reports!
A great Business Intelligence tool developed by Google
Numbers to Visualization ...
Your First step to data visualization
Marketing Agency Employee
Simple dashboards quick and easy
Google Data Studio is quite robust and worth a look
Great for not-so-complex analytics and dashboards
Solid software with interactive charts
Google Data Studio is fast and flexible, getting better with each release, and very stable / reliable. Good value and ROI.
Review Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio: Easy to pick up, and super powerful
Easy and Free to use
Awards
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Popular Features
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (49)9.494%
- Customizable dashboards (50)9.494%
- Report sharing and collaboration (50)6.262%
- Report Formatting Templates (49)4.747%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
What is Looker Studio?
Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
49 people also want pricing
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Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 8.2Pixel Perfect reports(35) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 9.4Customizable dashboards(50) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 4.7Report Formatting Templates(49) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 7.4Drill-down analysis(42) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 8.4Formatting capabilities(46) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 2.7Integration with R or other statistical packages(23) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 6.2Report sharing and collaboration(50) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 9.3Publish to Web(44) Ratings
- 6.8Publish to PDF(43) Ratings
- 8.1Report Versioning(31) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 4.3Report Delivery Scheduling(34) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
- 8.8Delivery to Remote Servers(18) Ratings
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
Data Discovery and Visualization
Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.
- 9.4Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(49) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 9.5Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(46) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 8Predictive Analytics(24) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Looker Studio?
Looker Studio vs. Looker
Looker Studio is a part of Google's Looker Suite for business intelligence. Looker Studio is a self-serve BI solution where less technical users can create charts and reports, while Looker is a complete, enterprise BI platform, where technical users can build complex models that consider every aspect of the business. Looker Studio offers both free and pro versions, while Looker is not available for free.
Looker Studio Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(268)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-12 of 12)Best Analytical tool
- Visualization design of dashboards.
- Integration with data sources
- Smooth access of BigQuery
- Creating aggregate function can be more smooth.
- Data banding can be improve.
- 3rd party integration of other data sources can be smooth and reliable.
A great Business Intelligence tool developed by Google
- It is online service. You don't need to upload an application to use it and it's free.
- It has many visualization tools.
- You can use many data sources to connect your data with Data Studio. For example Google Analytics, Google Sheets are among most popular choices for users.
- It is not that easy to learn Data Studio without tutorials and as I know Google don't have video lessons for Data Studio.
- Sometimes Data Studio can't differentiate metrics from dimensions.
- Charts sometimes don't work properly. You need to reload them again to fix errors.
Great for not-so-complex analytics and dashboards
- Ease of use
- User interface / look-and-feel of reports
- Pricing (has a free option)
- CSV file support minimizes barriers to entry
- First party connector support can be improved
- Complex visualizations / datasets may not be possible
- Cannot be used on-premise, which may cause issues with data compliance
Great for Tight Budgets or Simple Data Visualization
- Easy to design/brand
- Native data support for all Google products such as Adwords, Search Console, and Analytics
- Constantly improving and growing
- No native support for many outside sources like Facebook or Twitter (must build own or use third party software)
- Many features that are available in Tableau or other dataviz solutions aren't available yet
- Available templates aren't styled using default colors, so you have to update the color palette of each module by hand.
- Data Score boxes are very limited in what they can report
If you have to pull a lot of CRM data or outside connectors, you'll need to build the API yourself or purchase a connector from a third party. If doing so, you may want to seriously look at the all-in costs of the software stack; you may find that other (more supported) dataviz programs will be worth the cost. This is especially true if your pulling from 5 or more sources or if you need to query large amounts of data. But, if you're a SMB or a small agency creating a value-added report for your clients, then Data Studio is definitely a great place to start!
A Good, Free Tool to Aggregate and Visualize Data for Client Reporting
- Combines data sources into one report.
- It's free.
- Filtering is easy.
- It's intuitive if you understand analytics and ads.
- Allows you to send automated reports from your own email rather than from Google.
Perfect Free visualization tool!
We connected the platform with Google Analytics, so we are able to create graphs and dashboards super easily, compared to exporting the data and creating graphs in PowerPoint as it was done before. It allows us to focus on the data, rather than fetching the information.
- General user friendliness of the platform.
- Straight forward integration with Google Analytics - no table manipulations needed.
- Easy to add filters on a page or graph level.
- Integration with Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads is not super easy. We need to go through a third party tool.
- Sometimes it takes time to load the data.
- Doesn't work super well on all browsers - although never had issues using Chrome.
I wouldn't say less appropriate, but maybe a bit harder to integrate with the ads platforms, we need to go through a third party.
Lightweight tool, perfect for a small organization looking to scratch the surface of data visualization
- Data visualization
- Library of data visualization templates
- Intuitive
- Easy to share results especially if you already use G Suite\
- Like any tool, it would be nice to spend time learning and leveraging everything it has to offer
- Adding additional third party data connections
Nothing to hate with Google Data Studio
- Initial setup is well supported by Google.
- Versatile, especially if utilizing other Google marketing products.
- Clean visualizations courtesy of Google's material design.
- Connecting to databases wasn't as easy to set up as Tableau.
- Not as customizable as other BI programs.
- Browser only.
Looking for a FREE Data Visualization tool? Then Google Data Studio (P.S. Free For a Reason)
Our team's marketing department frequently looks at reports and dashboards to see leading and lagging KPIs across each platform.
Google Data Studio allows us to view all our data sources in one location, track A/B multivariate tests with WoW and MoM data, and makes it easy to make decisions and conducts tests as the data is presented in an easy-to-consume format.
- Pre-loaded Report Templates: Without a data visualization experience/training it's most likely difficult to set up the desired dashboard you envision. Fortunately, Google Data Studio offers pre-loaded reports for the most common data source connections. These common connections include: Google Ads, Firebase, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and more. They save a lot of time and are easy to substitute data variables.
- Being a remote company, it can be difficult to share in real-time... not with Google Data Studio. If our team is viewing the data on a call, we are able to update the dashboard in real-time and everyone is able to see the changes made without refreshing. Subsequently, as one user is able to change data parameters (dates, labels, etc) and the rest viewing the data are able to follow along.
- It can be difficult to get ideas how you should prepare your data - which KPIs should I include? In what order? Should I use a pie graph or bar chart? Thanks to Featured Data Studio reports I'm able to look at shared reports generated by others to get ideas on how to set up similar data.
- While Google Data Studio has a resources (video tutorial) tab, it's very basic. The tutorials state navigational answers to exploring around the site, setting up data connections, and creating calculated fields. The videos are outdated 2016 and older and rarely dig into the actual building of reports and dashboards, especially with Google-owned products.
- In order to connect solutions outside Google's products such as 3rd party tools, you need to pay a subscription to a 3rd party service to connect the data. The two main companies (Supermetrics, Power My Analytics) help you connect these 3rd party tools through their subscription services.
- Notification of data connections being removed. On a few occasions, I will enter Google Data Studio only to find out there is missing data and that I need to reconnect a data source. While this doesn't happen too often it would be ideal to be notified so I can fix this right away rather than be notified by a team member that the connection is broken.
Google's BI tool is slowly capturing the market
- Drag and drop your metrics and dimensions and you will get the report, the interface is super clean and it calculates real quick.
- Scheduling the report: you can schedule the process of downloading the report in PDF and sending it to you or your customers weekly/monthly.
- Frequent updates from Google makes this tool a go-to tool compared to other BI tools. You can also try the free version and it is amazing.
- One of the biggest drawbacks is that it requires connectors. Data Studio is a great tool as long as you connect Google products/separate files (Excel ), but when it comes to connecting third-party integrations, it's either complicated or not yet available.
- Data integration -- Connects easily with GA, Adwords, Search Console, Facebook Ads, GMB and many more!
- Live Data Connection -- It can pull data in real time from GA, Google Ads, GSC etc in real-time without having to refresh data.
- Dynamic controls -- Ability to interact with charts and widgets make the dashboards more appealing and informative.
- Increase support for connectors -- Currently, only about 150 data connectors are available.
- Limited data visualization options and widgets -- Something that can definitely be improved.
- Ability to slice and dice the data.
- Quickly build and prototype dashboards to test proof-of-concepts for data visualization.
- Hosted on Google which means it's accessible internally and externally to different parties (dev, data/analytics, client reps, account management).
- Well-maintained community connectors and documentation for extensive platform/data source support.
- Community connectors are developed by third parties and sometimes cost money, which can disrupt building free dashboards
- Reconciling disparate / multiple file types can be a hassle and usually requires doing it off-site (in SQL) to create a master data set for ingestion and viz in the Data Studio platform
If robust analysis on large datasets (>150,000) is a requirement, Data Studio is best deployed as a test-case or proof-of-concept before implementing a more comprehensive, powerful solution. It can ingest CSV and XLSX files, and community connectors/automation. This allows for data ingestion to come from platforms outside the Google Suite -- and while these connectors are generally reliable, they aren't maintained by Google and therefore can break, go out of date, etc.