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Looker Studio

Score8.1 out of 10

328 Reviews and Ratings

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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.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Looker Studio has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 328 ratings of Looker Studio's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Report sharing and collaboration

    Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Publish to PDF

    Category average: 8.7

  • Publish to Web

    Category average: 8.1

Areas for Improvement

  • Pixel Perfect reports

    Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.

    Category average: 6.9

  • Pattern Recognition and Data Mining

    Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.

    Category average: 6.7

  • Predictive Analytics

    Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.

    Category average: 6.5

Reviews

What users are saying about Looker Studio.
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Look at Looker Studio

Incentivized
Jake BodmerView profile
Mentor in Marketing at Plex (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My team and I use Looker Studio to create high level reporting that can quickly and easily tell the broader team outcomes of recent marketing efforts. It's a highly visual tool that let's me take a large amount of data and build reports to deliver to colleagues and c-suite execs to share out performance metrics.

Pros

  • Easy to build reports
  • Connects with a variety of data sources
  • If you're new to working with data Looker Studio helps you get comfortable and up and running quickly

Cons

  • Building reports are easy but understand what data to pull in to get to your end goal can take some time
  • I've run into row limit issue before if you're trying to pull in a large data set sometime it's just not possible and has to be broken up
  • Theres a limit of 5 sources when attempting to blend data which can be restrictive

Return on Investment

  • Democratizing data, enabling data-driven decisions
  • Free, easy-to-use, interactive dashboards that consolidate data from various sources
  • Interactive dashboards

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Looker, Fullstory, Tableau Cloud and Microsoft Power BI

Other Software Used

Tableau Cloud

Practical reporting with Good visibility.

Incentivized
Raj Shrivastwa
Salesforce Data Analyst in Quality Assurance at Arcserve (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Looker Studio primarily for our data quality metrics. We get data by connecting to 2 databases on different SQL servers. It helps us organise and materialise data, and we try to identify gaps in the integration through the reporting metric. It is really a lifesaver since our data got scattered after the system migration. Our primary use case is to identify errors/gaps in integration reporting and monitor them by reducing issues through proper planning.

Pros

  • Looker Studio helps us track error metrics in one place, making us more efficient as a team because we don’t have to switch between systems to gather data and then create a separate report.
  • Since our SQL data is pretty messy, it helps us with clean data reporting by visualising spikes in errors.
  • It also improves our communication with management, who are non-technical, by providing an easy-to-understand dashboard report.

Cons

  • It needs better handling of complex logic. We often need workarounds to perform complex custom calculations, and it can be really unpleasant at times.
  • Felt it got slow with a larger data set, and in one minor report, we had to set up time filters so that calculations during spikes could be traced more quickly.
  • Compare to competition they need to improve with notification things.

Return on Investment

  • It has reduced the manual reporting effort we were putting into compiling Excel spreadsheets. It saved us hours of our daily work.
  • Given its cost-effectiveness, time savings, and operational viability, we can say it has a positive ROI with minimal overhead.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI and Salesforce CRM Analytics

Other Software Used

Microsoft Power BI, Tableau Desktop, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce CRM Analytics

Its free and it can help you present data in an engaging way with some time

Incentivized
Lee PrestonView profile
Head of CRO in Marketing at CTI Digital (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Looker Studio to build reports, dashboards, and tell stories with data. It's a good way to show only the data a client needs to focus on, and remove all the noise & distractions.

We use it for marketing reports, CRO dashboards, A/B test results, and how people interact with pages on a clients' site

Pros

  • It lets you build custom reports to your specifications
  • It integrates with various data sources
  • It's a tool that clients can access easily
  • It's free!

Cons

  • It's not a simple task to build reports, there are SO many metrics / dimensions to choose from and it's not always obvious which ones will work / have data to them
  • It's hard to make it look GOOD without time
  • They can break
  • They changed how you blend data, so it's harder to get percentage values

Return on Investment

  • Looker Studio CAN make data easily accessible and presentable, saving time trying to get a point across
  • Looker Studio takes a lot of time to set up, and can sometimes be not worth the effort

Usability

Fantastic platform for deep diving into data.

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Social Media (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Used generally across marketing and fundraising teams to track user activity relating to website, paid digital marketing, organic social media, and other channels. Allows us to track performance for website traffic, revenue conversions, and their originating sources.

Pros

  • Breath of data - the number of ways to interrogate the data is endless, and the options to view metrics alongside each other make for comprehensive datasets.
  • Data visualisation and customisation - the options for presenting data and separating out across pages allow for clean visuals and segmented information.
  • Easy shareability/usability - a quick and simple tool to introduce colleagues to, and easy to grant access for them to be able to view the data, without having to understand the setup itself.

Cons

  • The styling customization layout could be slightly more user friendly/streamlined.
  • Having more information available on why data isn't pulling through on certain occasions (e.g., showing as 'Not Set', etc.) would be useful whenever possible.

Return on Investment

  • Improved visibility of conversion data for all teams.
  • Improved capacity to prove channel value.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Brandwatch, Emplifi, Sprout Social and AnswerThePublic

Other Software Used

Emplifi, Brandwatch

Looker Studio as a great value for money.

Incentivized
Verified User
Analyst in Marketing (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Looker Studio as our secondary BI tool to visualize data from Google tools, including Google Analytics and Google Ads. Thanks to easy integration with the Google environment, it provides a quick way to visualize data. It's very easy to use, so you don't need to be a data engineer to set up a basic dashboard. Our main reporting is based on another BI tool that is quite complex and takes more time to learn, so Looker helps us offload our Data Engineers when someone has a reporting need related to the Google Environment.

Pros

  • Easy to use.
  • Well arranged UI.
  • Good integration with Google products.

Cons

  • I could use built-in connectors for more data sources.

Return on Investment

  • ROAS improvements in Google Ads campaigns.
  • Conversion rate optimization.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, GoodData and Microsoft Power BI

Other Software Used

Keboola Connection, Google Ads, Tableau Server