Looker Studio Pro. Dawn of a new era?
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What is Looker Studio?
Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
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- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (49)9.393%
- Customizable dashboards (50)9.292%
- Report sharing and collaboration (50)6.666%
- Report Formatting Templates (49)5.252%
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What is Looker Studio?
Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
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What is Looker Studio?
Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, is a data visualization platform from Google that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
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 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 |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
Reviewers rate Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization highest, with a score of 9.4.
The most common users of Looker Studio are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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(26-50 of 51)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 13, 2020
Google Data Studio: all in one package
Google Data Studio is a Suite wich combines relevant data of web, app, campaign, and search. So it is used across the whole organization. With a good visualization, it is possible to manage all online data.
- Good visualization
- Perfect for all Google data tools.
- Ease to integrate
- Data privacy, GDPR
- Expensive for companies.
- Need to be used with other Google products.
January 24, 2020
Google Data Studio is a Great Tool!
We are a professional services organization, so we use Google Data Studio product to support our clients. We use it for a variety of use cases - simple web analytics reporting dashboards, SEO performance, cleaning up data via regex statements, executive dashboards of key metrics across a variety of platforms and custom spreadsheets. We also use this internally for the same needs, in addition to operational tracking and data visualization.
- Efficiently displays data that you need to refer to regularly.
- Makes data less intimidating to non-analytics stakeholders.
- Custom calculations
- More variety of graphs
December 30, 2019
Visualize the data that matters - for free!
Google Data Studio is solely being used by myself to present data and statistics mainly for marketing presentations within the organization, but also for external use when presenting to potential and current clients. Using the platform helps our organization to use data to make strategic marketing decisions, share real-time data with other employees, and communicate product value to our audience.
- Google Data Studio is great for companies who need to keep track of data that is constantly changing. For example, my organization uses it to track click-through rates in our PPC campaigns. In Data Studio, we can add a “running calculation” of click-through rates as the campaign goes on and the graph displaying the campaign results will continuously change to reflect the most current interactions.
- Google Data Studio has saved the marketing team time while enabling us to effortlessly improve communication with other departments. We often create PPC Campaigns for other departments like our training team who needs us to promote their training sessions and webinars. Rather than constantly exporting data and creating new graphs like we’ve done in the past to provide updates, we can set up Data Studio to continuously pull data from our Google AdWords Campaigns or Facebook Campaigns and automatically update the graphs. Since we can also create a shareable link to these graphs, any department we create campaigns for can see real-time campaign results and quickly understand whether potential clients are engaging with the content or not.
- Google Data Studio is great for displaying data that comes from multiple places. Like most marketing teams, we have data from social media accounts, Google Analytics data measuring our web traffic, email click-through rates, etc. In the past, I’ve had to merge data into one application before I could even begin to make a graph. In Google Data Studio, almost every platform is compatible and data can be automatically fed into the graphs you create on the platform.
- My only con for Google Data Studio is that it can be very difficult to understand how to import data. Despite the marketing team taking courses on Google Data Studio, we still often require assistance from the IT department for some web data imports. I can see this incurring additional costs for anyone who wants to use Google Data Studio - especially small businesses. Sometimes, it hinders my own team members from using Google Data Studio and they may use another platform, which limits how streamlined/organized our data reporting can be if it lives in several other places.
November 05, 2019
Google Data Studio Review
Google Data Studio is currently being used by my organization to support both Internal Marketing operations and our Consulting operations since I work for a consultancy. Many of our clients use it and we must have the ability and knowledge to be flexible and use their home systems. We also have used it internally. We use Google Data Studio in a variety of ways. We use it to organize our data, compile multiple sources and connect to other data systems.
- Free so this is a very low lift investment.
- Connectivity to all other Google platforms.
- Connectivity to many other platforms.
- Easy to use & understand.
- Better instructions would be helpful.
- Better tutorials for someone who is untrained in marketing operations.
September 14, 2019
Good challenger for Tableau
Currently, Google Data Studio is being used only by our organization's I.T. Dept. They initiated the analytics initiatives at our organization using Tableau Desktop then added the server. Google Data Studio is in an early phase with IT to compare against Tableau. Our organization is standardized on G Suite, so Google Data Studio would be a more natural fit compared to Tableau, plus it would save a significant amount of money on licensing.
- Web-based, no local software to install.
- Access control via existing G Suite accounts.
- Processing all in the cloud, not locally.
- Not as well developed/mature compared to other products.
- Horrible marketing, not well advertised by Google. We found it by accident.
- Room for improvement when connecting to data sources.
September 13, 2019
A great analytics visual tool for teams on a budget
Our marketing team uses Google Data Studio to visualize our marketing data. We use it for everything from blog traffic, website signups, to social media engagement and user demographics. Google Data Studio is a great tool for us because it's free, but it has some of the advanced features an enterprise software tool would have.
- Charts and graphs are very easy to create and read.
- Data sharing: it's easy to export a data set and share it with the people who need to see it.
- Collaboration: it's simple for our team to hop on and edit a report someone already worked on.
- The report is only viewable online. You can't export in a PDF or anything like that.
- No automated delivery (like google analytics).
- Errors: it's pretty common to get errors with your data, and it's not super clear what the issue is.
September 13, 2019
Very promising and easiest tool in market
Google Data Studio is used as a tool for developing dashboards and ad hoc reports. It is used by various members of the team as a way to showcase data insights and automate reports which were previously being distributed in the form of Excel sheets or Powerpoints.
Currently It is being used by our department only. The business problem it solves is the need for automated reporting dashboards and being able to create flexible reports.
Currently It is being used by our department only. The business problem it solves is the need for automated reporting dashboards and being able to create flexible reports.
- Selection of filters
- Being able to connect to a variety of live data sources
- It lives as a live document
- Easy to build
- Easy to learn
- Easy to share
- Conditional formatting
- Being able to share it inside of emails
- Being able to make a custom layout with good downloadable options. PDF download came very late
- Live text integration
- Dynamic image insertion which changes with dates
August 09, 2019
Data Studio: GA based reports at your fingertips.
Google Data Studio delivers daily, weekly and monthly updates on our KPI. Saves my time as I don't have to import/export data from a number of sources and combine the data into reports. It has a nice-looking report available online which also can be downloaded as a PDF if needed. My daily routine starts with Data Studio and coffee. Lacking one of them make me nervous.
- Import data from GA and display in comparison to a previous time period
- Prepare nice-looking high level report of sales that can be shared to stakeholders
- An online report can be shared via a link with stakeholder
- A report can be split by segments (like device type, campaign, date or landing page) dynamically
- A report has many sources build in OOTB
- You can blend date from a number of sources without using a single line of code!
- Data studio (as same as GA) is not the fastest, and sometimes you need to wait for a data.
- Would be good to have the possibility to schedule an automatic export a PDF and send via email.
- Amount of themes is rather low and there is no possibility to save your brand styling and use it in the next report.
We use Google Data Studio to power our monthly client reports at our search engine marketing agency. It's used by our whole organization. It solves the need to provide our clients with actionable, insightful monthly reports that pull from multiple data sources.
- Customizable — The options are endless on how to build and customize your reports.
- Fast — For as much data as we access, the reports load pretty quickly.
- Integrations — You can integrate with a wide array of data sources.
- Learning Curve — It took our team a bit of time to get up to speed with Google Data Studio. The reports are so customizable, it can be hard to know where to get started. We found success in starting with pre-built templates and learning from there.
June 19, 2019
Lightweight tool, perfect for a small organization looking to scratch the surface of data visualization
Google Data Studio is currently being used to share client metrics with our internal stakeholders. We have other third party systems push data into Google Sheets and from there Google Data Studio can ingest the data set. Admittedly it is currently a free tool which makes it simple and easy for our organization to utilize and interact with regularly. I enjoy the different data visualization tools and I don't encounter too many bugs/errors.
- 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
June 14, 2019
Nothing to hate with Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio was used in the interim before Tableau became our tool of choice. Google Data Studio is a versatile, low-cost alternative to Tableau for data visualization. In addition to having a low cost of entry to visualization, it can be relatively easy to set up for any user with little to no experience.
- 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.
June 11, 2019
View and analyze data effectively
Google Data Studio is being used throughout the company to visualize and analyze data in a simple and intuitive way to share or edit reports with colleagues in real time and send them via email to customers in order to make the best decisions for the organization. It also allows you to track your reports with the Google Analytics tool and the ability to combine different data sources.
- It allows us to collect all the necessary data so that it can be visualized in a simple and intuitive way.
- It supports the creation of interactive dashboards and quite visual reports that are very easy to use.
- You can use data from different sources through the connectors available on the platform.
- Custom metrics and dimensions can be created directly within the platform.
- The reports are interactive and can be shared quickly and easily.
- The integration with the data is very limited to Google products, only the connection with Google Analytics. That is very basic.
- It does not offer the option to print or download directly.
Google Data Studio is used mainly in our marketing analytics department. It serves various purposes ranging from post-campaign reporting to general data pulse checks. It expedites the process of collecting data so that we can focus more on insights drawn from the data and action items created from the insights.
- Ease of creating data visuals - you don't need to be an expert to manipulate the charts
- Ease of adding and removing data sources from a wide range of sources - google products, spreadsheets, etc
- Ease of sharing your reports with a URL link that anyone can access and use
- Ease of reproducing reports and templates for client-like work or recreating the same report for a different data source, like GA property
- The ability to calculate custom metrics is limited. Unfortunately, you can't apply a "filter" to a custom metric, which has been a major road block for our org lately
May 04, 2019
Looking for a FREE Data Visualization tool? Then Google Data Studio (P.S. Free For a Reason)
Google Data Studio is our organization's current aggregate data visualization tool for all organic media (Instagram, Facebook), marketing analytics tools (Firebase, Google Analytics, Google Search Console), and other user information software (Cooper - CRM, PostgresSQL, Google Sheets).
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.
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.
April 04, 2019
Google's BI tool is slowly capturing the market
We use it for our reporting needs. We connect our Google Analytics to Data Studio through the connector. Data Studio helps me to do much more in-depth analyses than what is presented in Google Analytics. We use it currently in our department and we are planning to expand it throughout our region. Apart from Google Analytics, we connect it to our database to do analysis and reporting.
- 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.
I use Google Data Studio as a data visualization tool to build dashboards and create reports. It easily integrates with other Google platforms such as Google Analytics and Google Ads (AdWords) which saves me time from having to export my data from each of these platforms and then import into a 3rd party data visualization tool.
- 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.
Google Data Studio is used on a per-user basis within the organization to import, manipulate, and visualize datasets. Google Data Studio functions as a dashboard for displaying data analysis to a variety of audiences: internal presentations and client-facing purposes. It was used primarily within the data and analytics department (who gathered specs and built/deployed the dashboards) and accessed by account managers and clients. It is a useful platform for quickly prototyping/designing different dashboard/visualization strategies without investing the resources on a comprehensive or especially sophisticated solution.
- 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
January 14, 2019
Google Data Studio: a half-baked product with good potential.
Data Studio is used on and off for really specific needs such as following closely a web site KPI for example. Currently, Data Studio works great with Google Analytics (GA) data. You can create OK looking dashboards using GA and make calculations between metrics. However, it's not yet ready to include outside source files and it becomes very complex to inject targets for example and calculate such KPIs as % Monthly sales vs sales targets. For this reason, we use Data Studio mainly as a quick access to GA data more than anything else.
- Quick visualization for real-time Google Analytics numbers.
- Calculations between GA metrics.
- Easy report distributions.
- Having green/red arrows to show how a metrics is fluctuating vs a defined period.
- Having control box or dials to switch between weekly and monthly views or filtering lists on different levels.
- The module to control external sources is awful and very complex and unreliable. Stick to GA data for now or use another tool such as Klipfolio to gain time.
December 19, 2018
Highly Customizable & Easy to Read
Google Data Studio has been used in a single department for the benefit of the entire agency, as well as our clients. The highly customizable interface has given us the tools to display the exact information we want to our agency and clients. We send monthly reports to our clients that mainly consist of Google data from both Analytics as well as Google Ads.
- Highly customizable
- Easy to read graphs
- Modern/sleek look
- Should provide some templates/direction for those who don't want to (or can't) start from a clean slate
- Additional integrations to provide a well-rounded story
December 10, 2018
No-cost way to analyze and report
The marketing department uses Google Data Studio to analyze and report on digital channels. The reports are shared with department heads and provide insight into marketing's results. The reports are very easy to customize and read.
- Integrated data from multiple channels.
- Allows for customization of reports and dashboard.
- Reliable tech from Google that improves over time.
- Does not necessarily integrate all data equally. Not all social channels allow their data to be imported via API, so be prepared to do some manual imports.
- You need to spend some time learning to use Data Studio to be able to generate reports. It's not a very intuitve interface.
- Needs a good tutorial.
November 28, 2018
A great way to automate reporting tasks
We use Google Data Studio to create a marketing dashboard, reporting on all active campaigns and how they're performing against key business objectives. This is being used within a single team right now, but based on our experience we may expand the use to other teams within our larger department. For us, it's really helped to automate reporting tasks and spend more time on analysis rather than pulling numbers. It's also enabled us to bring multiple sources into a single place for easier sharing.
- Connects seamlessly with Google products (Analytics and Ads) and allows you to quickly update reports with a click (or on a scheduled basis, depending on what's being pulled.
- Templates that provide a good starting point for common reports (like Google Ads effectiveness)
- Offers the ability to connect to a wide range of other products via connectors/Google Sheets, to bring all sources under one dashboard view
- Flexibility to blend data from sources together, create custom metrics, and customize reports in ways that you can't do easily within Google Analytics
- Sometimes a chart won't display in the way that I want, or won't show data at all, and it can be difficult to understand why. Error messaging/blank data could be more clear for troubleshooting purposes.
- It's nice to have the opportunity to bring in other data sources, but many of the connectors cost money, so it's easy to hit roadblocks in reporting.
- The limit of data points on a page can be challenging when trying to bring in a lot of different metrics - for example, I've run into scenarios where I want to add a new metric scorecard but am blocked from doing so, and need to split my report to a different page. I understand this is probably necessary for processing reasons (and processing can be an issue when presenting), but it can be frustrating.
November 28, 2018
Amazing Data visualization Tool. Don't miss out!!
Google Data Studio is been used across the entire organization. After analyzing its potential when it first came out, we decided to use it to create our clients' reports. The main problem it solved was to connected straight to the Google API and automatically update every month, saving us many hours in updating reports
- The new Data Blending feature allows you to integrate different data sources in one chart, which is particularly useful when displaying performance from different channels.
- The free version is very exhaustive and allows you to create comprehensive reports
- It connects with SuperMetrics which has great customer service. They are creating connectors on a regular basis, so just connect with them to put on a request
- It would be great to be able to aggregate data from different sources into 1 metric. Add of now, with the new data Blending, we can only see data from different sources as different metrics.
- When connecting to GA API, it would be great to see all options available in GA to replicate them in Data Studio. For example, it's not possible to see goal completions by name, only the total goal completion number.
- Creating tables from an excel sheet or Google sheet should be more simple: Before connecting the sheet, you have to transform your data so it's in Data Studio prefered format.
November 16, 2018
Makes me love data again
I use Google Data Studio to build reports that show the results of various online marketing campaigns that we run. It makes it very easy to design a good looking interactive report that I can easily change some data points on and then share out to others. It's also easy to update and add to a presentation when needed.
- Easy to create great looking reports to make data more accessible to anyone
- Can take a complex data set and gives you options on how to present them to make it make sense
- It can be used by people who do not have a data background or access to a data analyst
- There needs to be more templates ready to go, or at least an easy way for others to share their templates
- I would love it if some professional designers created some layouts that we could use for free
- Better error handling at times, not clear why data isnt showing up the way I want it to
May 25, 2018
Good tool to get a visual analysis of the data from internal databases and Google sources
In my company, Data Studio is used for two main purposes:
- Connect it with internal databases to create reports and graphics
- Connect and combine several data sources such as Google AdWords and Google Analytics to generate personalized and attractive reports for our clients, which can be consulted online and allow to automate this work
- Extract data from your own databases and present the information in a friendly way, thank you its
- Extract data from Google products such as Google AdWords and Google Analytics to combine in one report
- Share data with other people in the organization or clients
- It only allows you to extract data from its own sources or through an external database. It would be interesting if it allowed taking data from other types of sources, such as Facebook or Twitter.
- It also does not allow calculating metrics with different data sources, that is, you can not combine them with each other.
May 18, 2018
A powerful companion to GA
We use Google Data Studio for data visualizations when Google Analytics doesn't cut it. It's being used by the brand and marketing team to create easy-to-digest dashboards, especially in areas where we don't have access to Growth Strategy analytics.
- User interface. Easy to understand and visually friendly
- User experience. Designed well with easy learning curve
- Visualizations. There are a lot of impactful styles to choose from.
- Onboarding support could improve.
- Customer service could be more accessible.
- API integrations.