Looker Studio - Google's Data Visualization Solution
A user-friendly interface, customizable reports, and advanced visualization solutions are what Looker Studio offers. This business intelligence tool made by Google transforms raw and complex data into interactive and comprehensible reports for everyone. Discover this analytics platform, its features, strengths, weaknesses, and pricing.
What is Looker Studio?
Since 2022, Looker Studio has replaced Google Data Studio. The name has changed, but the principle remains the same. Looker Studio is still a collaborative decision-making tool. Specifically, it centralizes data from a wide variety of sources, simplifying report creation. Thus, you transform massive amounts of complex data into essential dashboards. Analysis of business results, understanding your target customer, tracking website traffic, assessing the financial health of the company, ... the cloud-based platform gives you an overview of your activity.
What are the main features of Looker Studio?
Creating Custom Dashboards
The strength of Looker Studio lies in its ability to create user-friendly reports that meet the most complex analysis needs.
To design your reports, you have two options:
Start from scratch: if you know exactly what you want, you can start with a blank page.
Use one of the templates: if you don't know where to start, you can choose from over 50 templates.
Whichever option you choose, you can always customize your report with the many data visualization tools offered. For example, you can add dashboards, charts, diagrams, pivot tables, bar charts, etc. Not to mention the filter and sorting functions that make data easier to understand.
Advantage: the numerous customization options allow you to create tailor-made reports to meet all needs.
Data Centralization
Looker Studio doesn't just help you create beautiful reports. It helps you design reports regardless of the data source. Whether the information collected comes from Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console, YouTube, Hubspot, LinkedIn Ads, BigQuery, MySQL, Twitter, CSV files, Facebook, ... the platform centralizes them all in one place. It connects to over 800 data sources.
And since it is a dynamic tool, you access your information in real-time. As soon as a change appears on one of your third-party tools, the data is automatically updated on Looker Studio, without you having to do anything.
Advantage: in addition to centralizing relevant data, you can track the evolution of your KPIs in real-time.
Report Sharing
Like many Google tools, Looker Studio is a collaborative tool. In other words, you can easily share it with your colleagues, managers, clients, ... And this, in several ways:
Sharing a link by email: people with the link can access the report.
Sharing a link on a website: here, the sharing is even broader if you have a lot of traffic on your site.
Exporting to PDF: this option allows others to view your report (but without the possibility of modification).
Automatic sending scheduling: for example, if you create quarterly reports for your clients, you can schedule these sends at regular intervals.
For each share, you define the associated access rights: view only, comment, or edit.
Advantage: Collaboration is simplified, both with internal collaborators and third parties.
What can you create with Looker Studio?
With its vast integration capacity and advanced customization tools, Looker Studio allows you to create all types of reports. For example:
Email campaigns: you can track various performance indicators, such as open rate, click rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, ...
SEO: data from GA4, GSC, and other SEO tools can be grouped here. You will find the click rate, impression rate, traffic, ranking, ...
Inventory management: again, you can track your KPIs, such as storage duration, stock level, sales rate, customer return rate, ... This will allow you to efficiently replenish your storage space to limit stockouts and overstocking.
What are the limitations of Looker Studio?
Although very useful for data collection, management, and analysis, Looker Studio is not without flaws. Here are the ones we have noticed:
No data sorting option is provided. If the collected information is outdated, incorrect, or incomplete, it will appear as such in your reports. This can bias decision-making.
Not all Google features are included, particularly some formulas that could be very useful for more comprehensive analysis.
Access rights management is limited to the pro version.
There is no versioning system that allows you to see and revert to different modifications made.
Our opinion on Looker Studio?
Despite these weaknesses, Looker Studio remains an extremely useful data analysis tool. On the one hand, its ease of use allows anyone to use this platform. Even if you don't have data analytics skills, you can create intuitive and relevant visual reports.
On the other hand, its integration capacity allows you to centralize data from almost your entire tech stack. You will no longer need to navigate between different tools. It's a real plus.
What are the prices of Looker Studio?
Like Google Data Studio, Looker Studio is available for free with many advanced reporting features. But if you want to go further in data management, the Looker Studio Pro version is preferable.
For $9 per user, per project, per month, you have access to:
Reports and data sources associated with organizations (and no longer with individual users);
Team workspaces for large-scale collaboration;
Automated report sending;
Access rights management;
Custom report links;
The mobile app.
Even without the pro version, Looker Studio continues to meet most analytics needs.
How to train on Looker Studio?
As with any tool, the simplest way is to train via the site's resources or YouTube tutorials.
But if you need structure and a real methodology, training is essential. At École Cube, our teachers work in the field to teach you practical cases that you can reuse in real situations.
