Looker is a BI application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. It includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for data discovery, and an API for supporting data in other systems.
N/A
Piano Analytics
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Piano Analytics, formerly AT Internet, provides digital analytics to help customers measure their audience, optimise their digital performance and create value. From data collection to exploration, activation, and the sharing of actionable insights, the Piano Analytics Suite is designed to provide reliable high-quality data to enhance decision-making company-wide. Adapted to e-commerce, media, finance/banking, and corporate websites & mobile apps, the vendor promises an easy-to-use solution…
Quick dashboards from Google Sheets - Easier to do the graphs than in Google Sheets - Operational dashboards to be used in the day-to-day work - It is good both for retrospective data and to do a pulse check of the current status - Better for not giant amounts of data and not multiple data sources. - If you need a lot of graphs to be displayed on the same page, it can be a bit glitchy during configuration (then the use works fine).
When it comes to web analytics AT Internet is well suited. We introduced AT Internet in 2017 after an evaluation project with other professional analytics solutions. Starting with our corporate website we quickly rolled it out to our customer experience platform, our webshops, and our corporate intranet based on SharePoint 2013. Especially the use in our intranet brought significant improvements over the standard analytics features SP 2013 is offering. The ATI tag systems with their flexibility allow us to include company-specific properties and thus making it possible for us to analyze our intranet usage on segments such as locations, branches, and so on.
Filtering - you can filter across different dimensions and metrics to get a more specific "cut" of data
Refreshing - data automatically ingests into Looker which allows reports to be updated and backfilled in real time
Conditional Reporting - you can leverage Looker's reporting features to flag when a given metric or KPI falls below or above a specified threshold. For example, if you had a daily sales benchmark in a SAAS organization, you could use Looker to flag whenever daily sales falls above or below the benchmark
Looker is less graphical or pictorial which makes it less attractive
Consumes a lot of memory when there are multiple rows and columns, impacts performance too
At times when we download huge chunks of raw data from Looker dashbords, the time taken to prepare the file is enormous - The user fails to understand if Looker has frozen or if the data is getting prepared in the background for downloading. In turn, user ends up triggering multiple downloads
Integrations with outside vendors: there are many ways to integrate data from outside vendors, however you can't display this information in every application unless you create a custom field, which can sometimes be limiting.
Access rights: there are two places to assign access rights and each place has slightly different functionality. You can get really granular with what each person has access to, but it is easy to miss a check box and have to go back and correct it.
Visualizations across applications: there are some really cool visualizations in the oldest application they support that includes predictive traffic estimates, automatic multi-period variations, etc., that aren't available yet in the newer applications.
We've been very happy with Looker so far, and all teams in the organization are starting to see its value, and use it on a frequent basis. It has quickly become our accessible "source of truth" for all data/metrics.
I gave this rating because I think that AT Internet is a good tool, user-friendly easy for onboarding and simple dashboards, however the majority of people use Google Analytics, especially media agency, it is easier for them to use Google Analytics.
Looker is relatively easy to use, even as it is set up. The customers for the front-end only have issues with the initial setup for looker ml creations. Other "looks" are relatively easy to set up, depending on the ETL and the data which is coming into Looker on a regular basis.
Overall the experience is very good, it's quick, relaiable and does everything I would want. The only problems I have are matching the correct stats to what I want. It can be painful trying to find the right thing and the explanations are not always the clearest. That's the only issue i've found though.
I don't have any exemple in mind where AT Internet interface hasn't been available, i have always been able to use AT Internet when i needed it. The only issues to notice is that it happens sometimes that real time or D-1 datas are partially delayed.
Never had to work with support for issues. Any questions we had, they would respond promptly and clearly. The one-time setup was easy, by reading documentation. If the feature is not supported, they will add a feature request. In this case, LDAP support was requested over OKTA. They are looking into it.
I have not used the Support Team thereby I am unable to review how their Support Teams works. However, in an instance where I had an issue, my concerned department contacted their support team and I was provided with the solution of the problem I was facing within a short span of time.
The in-person training unfortunately does not match to our expectations, was too much focus on digital basis and not on AT Internet functionnalties and how to use it. We paid for one day and only 15 minutes at the end was focused on our real needs in terms of media analytics.
Looker is an off-the-shelf, free tool for Google business users. Other than the internal cost of time to build, we had no costs to set up what we needed to do. Knowledge sharing internally and using templates greatly reduced this cost, making the overall cost very low.
AT Internet shows a deep understanding of our business objectives and provide us with ideas on how to solve them. They grant us enough time to try their tools and to be sure the tools are helpful. The data we've got in the Analyzer was manually checked and it was completely correct. Their roadmap was clean and aligned with our strategy
Regarding AT Internet possibilities, it could be adapted to small or large organizations, easy to set up. We can add sites in makets that we launch e-commerce.
Allowing others to self-serve their own analytics and connect it to Looker simply and easily has helped unblock the central data team so they can instead focus on validated dashboards whilst stakeholders manage their day-to-day analysis themselves. Countless engineering hours have been freed up by not having to manage every user permission for each BI tool; we have a BYOBI approach; Bring Your Own BI
Creation and management of a semantic layer (LookML =Looker Modeling Language ) allows peoples sandboxes and production databases to become clutter free. Minor adjustments, conditional fields, and even some modelling can all be done in LookML which doesn't need oversight or governance from the central data team.
LookML, specifying drilldown fields and their sub-queries, as well as generally creating dynamic parameters with Liquid are all great features, but can have a steep learning curve. it may take some time to understand how to create this middle layer correctly, or even pose a risk of inheriting complex code from another source which can be unmaintainable if it becomes too big. Some level of governance is recommended if Looker is used by a large number of editors.
Unfortunately, I do not have precise results to give, but the statistics provided by AT Internet make it possible to carry out in-depth analyses and to make good decisions.
You just have to know how to find the information and interpret it.
