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Looker

Looker

Overview

What is Looker?

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…

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Recent Reviews

Great reporting tool

8 out of 10
March 15, 2024
Incentivized
We are using Looker Studio to create dashboards that’s can be shared with other departments. We can include information from different …
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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 21 features
  • Customizable dashboards (87)
    8.9
    89%
  • Drill-down analysis (86)
    8.7
    87%
  • Report sharing and collaboration (89)
    8.4
    84%
  • Formatting capabilities (87)
    6.7
    67%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Unavailable

What is Looker?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://cloud.google.com/resources/look…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is SAP Crystal?

SAP Crystal is an analytics and reporting software solution for SMBs. SAP Crystal comprises Crystal Reports for pixel-perfect reporting, and SAP Crystal Server for automated distribution and self-service access to reports, dashboards and data exploration.

What is SAP Lumira Discovery?

SAP Lumira Discovery is SAP’s data visualization and discovery application. It facilitates data discovery, visualization, and analysis by assisting users with creation of dashboards, infographics, presentations, data facets, tag clouds, and more.

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Product Demos

How To Use Looker as a Business User

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

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

7.7
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

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

7.8
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.6
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.

7
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.1
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

5.2
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is Looker?

Looker is a business intelligence application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. The Looker platform includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for creating data discovery experiences and an extensible API set so the data can exist in other systems.

Looker vs. Looker Studio


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 and Looker Studio integrate with each other to support both types of analysis at businesses.

Looker Features

BI Platform Features

  • Supported: Administration via Web Interface
  • Supported: Live Connection to External Data
  • Supported: In-memory data model
  • Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
  • Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer

Supported Data Sources Features

  • Supported: Oracle
  • Supported: MS SQL Server
  • Supported: IBM DB2
  • Supported: Postgres
  • Supported: MySQL
  • Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
  • Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
  • Supported: EMC Greenplum
  • Supported: IBM Netezza
  • Supported: HP Vertica
  • Supported: ParAccel
  • Supported: SAP Hana
  • Supported: Teradata
  • Supported: Sage 500
  • Supported: SAP

BI Standard Reporting Features

  • Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
  • Supported: Customizable dashboards
  • Supported: Report Formatting Templates

Ad-hoc Reporting Features

  • Supported: Drill-down analysis
  • Supported: Formatting capabilities
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
  • Supported: Report sharing and collaboration

Report Output and Scheduling Features

  • Supported: Publish to Web
  • Supported: Publish to PDF
  • Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
  • Supported: Report Versioning
  • Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
  • Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
  • Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control
  • Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Looker Screenshots

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.

Looker Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesUnited States, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Domo, MicroStrategy Analytics, and Tableau Server are common alternatives for Looker.

Reviewers rate Customizable dashboards highest, with a score of 8.9.

The most common users of Looker are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(376)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 89)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is the best tool for serving visualization purposes for the companies who are using GCP; we utilize majority of our dashboards with Looker, as it is easy to work with, and highly integrable with other data sources. Time-to-value is important and since BigQuery was the underlying solution for our datasets, Looker's was the most convenient visualization solution for data democratization.
  • Integration with numerous datas ources
  • Not steep learning curve, anyone with less tech knowledge can work on that
  • Compatible with GA for Firebase
  • Good functionalities for visual exploratory data analysis
  • Variety of visualisations
  • Colour codings are not intuitive
  • More finetuning for visualizations needed (Like PowerBI)
Easy to use for the non coders and less techy people. Smooth onboarding on the platform and accessible guide and walkthrough available. The solution is scalable and can answer almost any kind of huge datasets. Looker is doing great for e-Commerce's analytics as it provides out of the box templates for visualizations.
March 15, 2024

Great reporting tool

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Looker Studio to create dashboards that’s can be shared with other departments. We can include information from different sources so that all the sources of truth are included and can be analyzed in a single platform.
  • Blending sources
  • Charts variety
  • Access management
  • It’s a bit laggy
  • Some charts are limited
  • You can’t create relationships between data sources
It’s a great free platform and is intuitive for first time users. For simple dashboards it’s the best option but if needed to do more complex tables and relate different tables to create graphics, it’s too difficult
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have Looker in place to view all of the usage data and metrics to track our customers' usage patterns. It is a vital tool that we can use to generate alerts highlighting an urgent need to upgrade or take action on the account. It is a lifesaver for CSMs and Salespeople, as without this, we would be completely blindsided.
  • Usage dashboards.
  • Alerts on action needed.
  • Overview of the adoption.
  • The platform is very slow in general.
  • It's not very intuitive.
  • Making dashboards on looker is a hard task.
I would highly recommend Looker as a tool. The integrations with our existing CRM and product are great, and the data is almost always accurate. I highly recommend this tool to every organization that wants to monitor their customers' data and understand their usage habits. You can do various cohort analyses with this data.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Looker very frequently as they can provide a number of data options, such as charts and graphs and scalability which meets our needs perfectly. Also their range of useful characteristics includes cost control, AL and ML and security emphasis which can increase your overall business productivity and efficiency. So if your company wants to maximize its productivity and efficiency, this is the way to go.
  • Offers numerous data options and scalability.
  • Can increase productivity and efficiency with greater cost control.
  • Can easily customize your data.
  • Data migrating or uploading time could be reduced.
  • Managing large number of users can easily become very tough to handle.
  • No other downside.
It is well suited for almost every kind of business. That is mainly due to its good pricing structure, which can help cut unnecessary costs. Plus, it helps increase the overall productivity and efficiency of the business.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our main use case is to prepare dashboards showing the status of our internal work queue based on a Google Sheet that contains all the queue elements. We show graphs and KPIs such as the number of elements, the number of elements that exceeded a certain number of days, the average number of days to close them, the distribution across the different subteams, and the distribution per status.
  • It is very easy to start a new dashboard and configure what you want to display by just selecting/dragging from the list of available columns.
  • It is intuitive, mainly if you use other Google services like Google Sheets.
  • The look and feel is modern and nice.
  • It it very useful to have an immediate visual overview of the data in a spreadsheet.
  • I’d like a bit more personalization, particularly in the “Style” section (e.g., fonts, paragraph settings, the ability to map the axis labels to shorter names…).
  • Performance can be quite slow when there are many graphs on one page, even making the page unresponsive sometimes.
  • I’d love to be able to easily embed a dashboard in the Google Sheets it comes from (without injecting code to embed the HTML).
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).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At our organization, we leverage Locker Studio to facilitate the aggregation of data from multiple sources and automate the generation of a wide range of reports. The implementation of Locker Studio enhances our ability to efficiently compile and analyze large datasets, resulting in timely and accurate reporting across various business functions.
  • Connect to multiple data sources.
  • Automated data aggregations.
  • Automated data segmentation.
  • With larger data sets it slows down.
Locker Studio excels in its ability to seamlessly connect to numerous data sources, making it a versatile solution for data integration tasks. Beyond its connectivity features, Locker Studio offers a comprehensive suite of functionalities for aggregating, processing, and analyzing fetched data. Furthermore, its robust capabilities extend to data visualization, empowering users to generate insightful charts, graphs, and dashboards to better understand and communicate their data-driven insights.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Looker to provide daily insights into marketing performance at each of our individual channels, including traffic, revenue, costs, and detailed trends on YoY, WoW, and general sequential information. I use Looker to create dashboards frequently to help answer specific marketing questions.
  • Summarizes data in easy-to-interpret visuals
  • Simplifies the process of compiling and comparing data points
  • Enables bespoke calculations alongside raw data to improve understanding
  • Manual, bespoke calculations language is complex and can make it challenging to do simple calculations
  • Charts/tables can be inflexible or challenging to tailor to the exact view you are looking for
  • Challenging to see all of the available data points given how the side navigation is structured
Looker is very well suited to environments where you want to empower people at all levels and analytical skillsets to be able to quickly build dashboards at scale, as well as share updates in an automated fashion. It is less appropriate in environments where there is a strong need to have a lot of customizations in the chart/table output.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is used as a primary data visualization tool at the company. We not only use it for internal reporting but we also expose the dashboards and reports within our product that is provided to our customers. It has met if not exceed nearly all of the expectations we were looking for when it came to a data visualization tool.
  • Dashboards and Reports
  • Logical Separation of Data Fields and Measures
  • Tailored Report and Data Delivery
  • Customizing Data Schedule
  • Complex Query Building
  • Lack of Documentation
Looker is an excellent tool when it comes to data manipulation and representation. It allows for custom embeds into existing products which meets the needs of our customers. However, there are a few areas of improvement that should be mentioned. Looker is not ideal for highly complex queries as it sometimes times out or doesn't render the full picture. It also does not allow for multiple people to change the cadence and preset delivery of reports (it removes the previous settings). Also, the lack of documentation and training has made it difficult to onboard additional team members to the product.
David Mynář | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an digital agency, we report to our clients on daily basis. Our clients demand comprehensive, understandable, and actionable insights into their marketing campaigns. Traditional reporting tools can be cumbersome and not flexible enough. Looker allows us to create customized, interactive reports and dashboards that clients can explore, helping them understand their campaign performance at a glance. Looker offers a practical solution for creating interactive marketing reports and data visualizations.
  • Easy to learn
  • Hundreds of data connectors, including community connectors
  • Free to use
  • Resource (CPU/RAM/network) heavy
  • Price of advanced connectors
  • No mobile app
Looker is well suited for:
- Reporting multichannel and complex campaigns
- Medium to large data driven projects
- Google ecosystem data projects (Google Analytics, Big Querry, Google Ads and more)

Not so well suited for:
- Small projects with only one marketing channel
- Huge projects with heavy streaming needs
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Our company uses Looker for organizational business intelligence in order to access, analyze, and act on the up-to-date, trusted version of our data, and deliver trusted data experiences, at scale, from the cloud we use empowering users with real-time insights.
Moreover we are centralizing trusted metrics across teams and applications. Deployoing and test changes to metrics with confidence and enable collaboration with unified measurement, connected to business intelligence software.
  • Self-service business intelligence for everyone
  • Data modeling to unify business metrics
  • Embeds analytics and applications
  • Data plotting issues
  • Somehow missing connection to data source
  • Often shows data set configurations error
We use Looker Studio Pro for embedded Analytics. Looker makes getting started with customized analytics really easy. It has a large number of features and tools that offers for advanced use cases even if Data Studio is still useful for some topics. Unfortunately the free version is a little bit better than the enterprise-embedded BI tools.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker helps us promote a "data driven" culture. That is, we share statistics in a friendly way and with the appropriate level of permissions.
  • statistics visualization
  • creating thematic dashboards
  • permissions management
  • it offers many possibilities, but is not easy to use from the first visit
We build analytics for a given product. The work involves business, marketing, technical people and trade. Different values are important for everyone, everyone has a different level of knowledge and time to learn individual data from different places. Looker allows you to create one dashboard for everyone, only with agreed and explained values.
Chetan Gavade | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker helps to create a very representative dashboards. It helps to visualize to much of data points on any webpage or any Instant messaging software which we use. It helps us to share details to the large audience at a time. Due to fast and easy configuration of the visualization of the data it helps to achieve more productivity.
  • Data Visualization
  • Sharing of Reports
  • Sync with multiple data points
  • Content Management
  • Robust nature
  • Need more developer options to user
Looker will help to represent the reports anywhere on the cloud, websites or on any application. The data visualization which is managed by Google Looker is very much interactive & customizable. Looker will provide the best dashboards representation from many data points like SQL, Bigquery. You can also automate the dashboards representation by adding codes as required.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is a powerful data analytics tool that in our company is both used internally - for tasks like workforce performance management, specific profitability of a contract and financial audit in general - and "sold" to our customer. "Sold" is quoted because it's not just a matter of licensing: selling this product means also teaching how to use it because of its almost infinite customization capabilities.
  • Real time data aggregation
  • Very large data source connection pool
  • Querying data can be as simple as a filter, up to LookML
  • The default user interface is very spartan
  • If you don't use BigQuery, some queries can be slow
  • LookML can be daunting
Internally we mainly use Looker to monitor KPI related to development processes and contract profitability: we collect data from other platform (Jira, ERP) and match them in order to see the status of economics and delivery KPIs. This allows us to see if and where there are areas of intervention in our group.

Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Looker for data analytics with our engineers and product teams, to better understand our speed and accuracy that our APIs provide to our customers. We are also using Looker to determine error messaging for when our APIs fail so that we can fix these errors.
  • Looker has high bandwidth and can process a lot of information quickly
  • Looker is relatively easy to understand as a non technical staff
  • Looks provides a lot of flexibility to integrate with our APIs
  • Looker isn't build friendly with non engineering staff
  • Looker crashes occasionally
  • Looker could have a better looking UI
It is well suited for use for our engineering team, and not as useful for non-technical staff who aren't able to intuitively use Looker without some additional training or help from the data analytics team. It is occasionally hard to navigate the filtering and could be easier to use - but serves its current use case with our engineering team.
Billy Heany | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Looker as a way to analyze web performance over time as well as quickly and easily compare performance monthly across various channels. Every website i manage is setup with Looker with the data coming in automatically and then the insights included for each major call out for easy client viewing.
  • Automation
  • API coverage
  • Integration of many different data sources
  • Customization
  • Ease of use
  • Data uptime (portions go out frequently)
  • Help articles and resources are lacking
  • Learning curve is steep
Looker is well suited for any user who would like up their reporting game from what you have situated in Google Analytics. The best part is being able to have everything in one simple to use dashboard vs clicking around multiple sites and pages to get all the data you would like to see at a glance. If you only use GA, then it's probably not necessary
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Looker business-wide for employees to gain insight on marketing and user acquisition as well as user behavior and metrics such as ROAS, LTV, retention, attrition, etc. We also use Looker for more high-level monitoring regarding daily revenue, costs, net revenue, and projections. We have differing levels of granularity in our visualizations and employees are free to create their own Looks aside from the main Dashboards and KPIs I prepare as Head of BI.
  • Visualization
  • Version Control.
  • Organization
  • Customer Support.
  • Error Handling/Reporting.
  • Pricing
I think Looker as a platform is very comprehensive and while there is a bit of a learning curve in modeling (LookML, backend structure, etc.), once familiar, the breadth of capabilities is impressive. There are some shortcomings (not being able to replace a dashboard, but instead having to delete and publish a new one if there are edits that need to be overridden if they aren't edited directly on the specific dashboard). Pretty pricey as well.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Looker to create dashboards and calculations for other tools, such as our CRM platforms. Looker imports our analytics tools from Google and other sources to flawlessly visualize them and later embed them into shareable dashboards that can then be accessed by clients, internal staff, and partners.
  • Perfect integration into other dashboarding platforms.
  • Pulls data from multiple sources.
  • Integrates with our Hubspot CRM.
  • Finicky user interface.
  • Pretty extensive learning curve.
  • Would love to see a seamless integration of UA and GA4 together.
If your company wants to create advanced dashboards from Google Analytics and other integrated sources available through Looker’s API, then this is the right tool. I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re only using Google Analytics as your source, as they’re more than enough to report on web traffic.
Danilo Roberto Zerón | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The primary business solutions that Google Looker Studio can help provide include data visualization, in-house custom performance dashboard creation, and internal-facing KPI reporting. The primary scope of our use case with Google Looker Studio (i.e., formerly Google Data Studio) is to help review keyword/search term performance, device-level performance, and ongoing budget/spend pacing.
  • Data Visualization.
  • Custom Performance Reporting Dashboard.
  • Performance Analysis.
  • Blending Cross-Channel Data.
  • Troubleshooting Data Errors.
  • Properly Ensuring Data Validation/Accuracy.
  • Inconsistent Custom Data Filtering Options.
An example of a scenario where Google Looker Studio is less appropriate for a business would be a start-up that is seeking to keep costs low, and that is advertising or seeking to report on performance data across multiple platforms. Google Looker Studio has the capability to "blend" cross-channel data into a singular report, but this feature does require a paid "connector" tool, or multiple tools, to successfully complete the integration. Therefore, lower-budget and multi-channel organizations might not be best suited for GLS. On the other hand, any organization seeking to report on Google Data across the Google platform will find tremendous resources in GLS with respect to data analytics and performance reporting!
March 12, 2024

Looker Review.

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is a business intelligence application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. We use Looker for creating monthly reports. Additionally, it helps to provide a friendly interface for non-experienced users, integrate data, and manage data easily for DBs, data analytics, and many other tasks.
  • Simple interface.
  • Helps users with no SQL experience.
  • Easy to integrate.
  • Scalability for large data.
  • Time for import large amount of data.
Looker could be a good tool for day-to-day, but it is difficult to maintain for some advanced features, and it could be broken sometimes; it helps users with no experience to develop and create data reports that can be more difficult with other tools with no experience, so it could be adopted in an easy way.
Marcos Vinícius Costa de Carvalho | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Looker to build analytical dash boards to provide data from different sources inside my organization. Presenting data with good visuals and dynamic data slicing and cross filtering so that the users can obtain insights from data
  • Visually good graphical representations
  • Data combination tool
  • Native data integration with google products (ads, analytics, etc)
  • Fully real-time collaborative
  • Lacks a native data wrangling tool
  • few options for visuals customization
  • few native connectors with external sources
  • Excel Online Connector
Looker is such a great product when it comes to free tools for presenting data. it can natively connect to different external sources and google products, which makes it a great tool to monitor Web Analytics, ad analytics and Social media. it could include a data wrangling module (such as power query in Powe BI) and add more native connectors. An API connector would be great, too. I also feel like it lacks customization options for the visuals, when compating to Power BI. It is too much restrained by the Material UI design, which does not necessarily fits all branding needs. Another great feature is the colaboration. Different from Power BI, you can real time collaborate with this tool, which is great for larger teams!
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Looker as the visualization tool for the data of some of the SW applications we developed in the organization. It is used normally for those applications where Google Analytics information is available. We use it as a tool to share and visualize data but also to extract information to analyze it in other tools.
  • Integration with some solutions
  • Easy data extractation
  • Easy to build visuals
  • It is too difficult for simple use cases
  • User experience is not intuitive enough for explorers
  • Integrations with other visualization tools from other companies can improve
It is especially useful for organizations when it can be used as the single source of truth for all the analytics.

It would not be the best option if some data is not accessible easily or in the cloud. Also in case other visualization tools are need, it may add an unnecessary step to really be able to analyze all the data.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Looker to plug and play with other Google products, such as porting data from Search Console or Google Analytics, and even Google Sheets to join data sources. When GA4 launched, it became a lot more tricky for us to get visibility into the data we needed, so Looker was the ideal solution for us. We've created custom reports with dashboards and used templates readily available, which is a great plug-and-play option for setting up views quickly. It's also straightforward to do more complex things that we'd usually need Data Analysts to do in SQL, like joining data tables, because adding tags and categories to imported data with data joins is possible.
  • Easy to set up.
  • Shareable and end-user ease of use.
  • Data joining is a particular highlight for tagging up URLs.
  • Plug and play in many cases.
  • Menus and navigation for set up can be a bit confusing for first time users.
  • Add the ability to manually change the canvas size rather than setting it in pixels, which is counterintuitive.
Joining data from different sources or setting up customizable reports based on data housed outside standard reporting tools. Create dashboards for end-users to fulfill their reporting needs, reducing regular work and lifting on centralized team members. Using templates to plug and play to get data visualizations pretty quickly and painlessly! Unfortunately, if you've previously used Looker with Google's Universal Analytics, you'll need to reset a lot of the data parameters to work with GA4 data, but once you've done this, it works really well and is a lot less painful than using GA4 natively.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Looker to track everything about marketing delivery, opens, clicks, and conversion tracking. This includes email, SMS, push, and external channels. This allows us to distribute this important information across the entire organization so that when someone needs the information, they have it immediately and without extra effort from the seats that are responsible for producing the content or managing the channels.
  • Granular reporting.
  • Ease of building.
  • Ease of access.
  • Needs training to be a builder.
  • Needs training to be a user.
  • Can get visually cluttered.
I'd say that Looker is fantastic for distributing the efficacy of marketing efforts. It can be a one-stop shop for everything related to this. However, if your organization doesn't have direct access to live data and instead has only access to images of your data, then Looker may not be the best bet for you.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is used throughout my organization, for reporting on a host of different areas including revenue tracking, ad request monitoring, campaign management/pacing, and traffic acquisition. We have scheduled email reports set up covering a plethora of different use cases, that are leveraged both internally and externally. Problems addressed include regular access to data, distributing information to stakeholders on a fixed cadence, and keeping different teams appraised of what is going on while mitigating the need for excessive meetings.
  • 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
  • Filtering - while the filter-ability of Looker is quite robust, the feature can be quite inconsistent. For example, sometimes you have to refresh a Look several times to get a filter to register all available options
  • Row Limit - while it happens infrequently, it may be the case that you need to export a dataset that is comprised of over 5,000 rows. Looker can be a bit finicky in this case, as you are unable to export over that amount, which means you would need to export the data in multiple sets, increasing the likelihood of duplicate rows
  • Data delay - sometimes the timing around data refreshes can be very inconsistent, so it can be difficult to guarantee a Look refreshing correctly at a specified time.
Well Suited: Aggregating massive amounts of data, segmenting it by a given unit of time, and setting up reports to monitor it. When properly set up, Looks can be the bedrock of an organization's analytical/reporting capability.

Less Appropriate: Explore models can quickly become dysfunctional and slow. One area for improvement is some kind of recommendation system to say "make these tweaks to your Explore to avoid errors with loading time."
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Looker in my business for both business and marketing analytics, across a myriad of data sets and sources
  • Cross reference
  • Data analysis
  • Data piping
  • Highly complex, requires many hours to truly master
In any business setting where commerical, marketing, etc. data is sourced from multiple platforms, servers, etc.
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