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Looker Studio

Looker Studio
Formerly Google Data Studio

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

Best Analytical tool

8 out of 10
March 29, 2023
Incentivized
As data analysts, we have to create the report and dashboard in GDS. So, we have integrated some data sources like Google Analytics, …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 15 features
  • Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (49)
    9.3
    93%
  • Customizable dashboards (50)
    9.2
    92%
  • Report sharing and collaboration (50)
    6.5
    65%
  • Report Formatting Templates (49)
    5.1
    51%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

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

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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.5
Avg 8.4

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

6.3
Avg 8.0

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

7.5
Avg 8.4

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.

8.9
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

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 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 SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(267)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-8 of 8)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Rafael Grandizoli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Data Studio is used across some departments in the company to create dashboards and reports to help the team have insights and analyze performance from multiple advertising campaigns. In a quick and easy way, any of our users can access the data and create charts, tables and compose dashboards for their work.
  • Simple data integration from files.
  • Create calculated fields using data (for metrics).
  • Plot charts and tables quickly.
  • Organize everything in a dashboard.
  • Easy sharing.
  • Data preparation.
  • Custom integrations.
  • Combine sources with recurrent process.
For a daily basis use, Google Data Studio can provide almost everything you need to generate a simple data visualization that can be easily updated (with an automated integration or manually). It can help create a basic BI analytics dashboard, but not complex ones since it would need more development skills.
Christopher Penn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Data Studio is used both inside our organization and on behalf of clients. It's our primary reporting and visualization tool, and the primary method we communicate data to clients. Because of its robust integration capabilities and ease of use, it's our first go-to for any basic data visualization from cloud-based data.
  • Free.
  • Easy to use, like the rest of Google Docs.
  • Integrates with hundreds of data sources.
  • Calculated fields are clumsy.
  • No variables/data storage.
  • Not a BI/computational tool, visualization only.
Google Data Studio is a visualization tool. It's mandatory for anyone using the Google Marketing Platform, especially Google Analytics 4. It's essential for low-cost, lightweight visualization applications where live data and reporting is needed.

Google Data Studio is not a BI tool. It doesn't pretend to be one either, but that means you need to carefully think through what kinds of data you're going to be visualizing, and doing that pre-processing BEFORE your data gets to Google Data Studio.
Meredith Walter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
If a user is looking for a free data visualization tool, I'd highly recommend using Google Data Studio as a starting point. As you use GDS, you'll gain a better understanding of the features you'll actually use and perhaps some that you wish GDS had. You could then take that insight into your purchase decision of a more robust data viz software like Domo or Tableau.

If a user is looking for a tool that will connect several custom data sources or making very advanced data visualizations, GDS is more than likely not a good option. It is limited with its connections and calculated metrics, as well as the type of visualizations you can create.
Sam Lepak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
If you are looking for a free data visualization tool or are a smaller business that uses mainly Google entry products and a few outside analytical tracking tools, then I would highly recommend Google Data Studio. Instead, if you evaluate data from a lot of third-party tools or you have an enterprise software solutions, it would be better suited to look into a paid data visualization tool like Tableau.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Well Suited: Simple/complex reports as long the source is from a Google app; for super quick reporting with an Excel file; If you are not a data professional but still want to start with reporting. Less appropriate: If you have used an enterprise reporting tool such as Power BI or Tableau, you might not see this as an equivalent tool or replacement tool.

Francois Salvert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Really depends on the need. If it's to produce a dashboard that needs to look good and is reliable, I would use a different tool. However, if that colleague is an analyst, I think Data Studio is a quick and free tool you need to have in your analytics toolbox.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
More suited for companies/agencies/clients looking for specific website and Google Ads data in a highly customizable setting. For those also looking for email, social, and other insights, this isn't the most well-rounded tool for them. I'm not sure I would recommend the tool for e-commerce businesses either, as those specific platforms probably offer more expansive/specific analytics.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Data Studio to beautify and simplify raw data for clients. At one point in time clients claimed they wanted the raw data and would do these things themselves. Unfortunately, and predictably, that ended up not being the case. Google Data Studio allows us—with some exceptions—to quickly get them the deliverable they want and we don't mind spending the extra time as it's minimal with maximum client satisfaction.
  • The integration offering is robust and I've yet to run into a situation where we were not able to get our data into Google Data Studio
  • Creating a beautiful report can be done with minimal training
  • Sharing a report and determining the permissions takes seconds which is especially valuable when someone wants to see something quickly
  • We often have data fields that have multiple values separated by commas. Some BI tools provide options to visualize that data as a group or as individual data points. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a simple way to do this in Google Data Studio
  • Copying a report is, surprisingly, different from other Google Suite tools. Continuity is difficult in a company the size of Google but it's still disappointing.
  • Forgiveness could be improved when it comes to configuring the data resource. Often, sometimes 20+ minutes can be wasted on a 1 second mistake. This could be a user error but it's one that I haven't found an easy answer for.
Rather than trying to create visuals in Google Sheets, you're able to create a much prettier and interactive combination of visualizations when connecting that specific Google Sheet to Google Data Studio.

This being a free tool, I've found that a lot of advanced functionality we enjoy using in other BI tools is lacking in Google Data Studio. Therefore, if you really want to dig into data, it may not be the right fit for you.
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