## Introduction [Looker Studio](https://lookerstudio.google.com/) is a free, cloud-based business intelligence (BI) tool that enables users to create interactive reports and dashboards. It integrates seamlessly with various data sources, allowing businesses to visualize and analyze data efficiently. Looker Studio simplifies data exploration through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, custom formulas, and real-time collaboration, making it a powerful tool for data-driven decision-making. <br> ![[Looker Studio Report Demo.png]] *Home page of a report page in Looker Studio* ## Features - **Data Connectivity**: Connects to multiple data sources, including Google [[BigQuery]], [[Google Sheets]], Google Analytics, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and third-party platforms, providing a unified view of business data. - **Interactive Data Visualization**: Offers a wide range of visualization options, including bar charts, line graphs, heatmaps, and tables, enabling users to create insightful, interactive reports. - **Custom Metrics & Formulas**: Allows users to define custom calculations, aggregations, and transformations using a formula editor, ensuring flexibility in reporting and analysis. - **Real-Time Data Updates**: Supports live data connections for real-time reporting, ensuring that stakeholders always have access to up-to-date insights. - **User Access Control**: Provides role-based access control (RBAC) and sharing options, ensuring that sensitive data is accessible only to authorized users. - **Data Blending**: Combines data from multiple sources within the same report, enabling cross-platform analysis and a more comprehensive understanding of business performance. - **Collaboration & Sharing**: Enables multiple users to work on reports simultaneously and share insights via links or embedded dashboards. - **Custom Themes & Branding**: Allows organizations to customize reports with brand colors, logos, and fonts to maintain consistency across visualizations. ## Applications - **Marketing Analytics**: Visualizes campaign performance, website traffic, and conversion metrics by integrating with platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads. - **Financial Reporting**: Helps finance teams track revenue, expenses, and profitability trends by aggregating data from multiple financial sources. - **Sales Performance Tracking**: Monitors sales trends, customer acquisition costs, and deal pipeline progress through CRM integrations like Salesforce and HubSpot. - **Operational Dashboards**: Enables teams to track KPIs, monitor business operations, and improve efficiency with real-time data updates. - **Embedded Analytics**: Provides an option to embed reports into web applications, portals, or internal dashboards for seamless data access. - **E-commerce Insights**: Connects with Shopify, WooCommerce, and other platforms to analyze sales trends, customer behavior, and inventory management. ## Best Practices - **Define a Clear Data Structure**: Organize data sources efficiently and ensure proper data relationships to avoid duplication and inconsistencies in reporting. - **Optimize Data Refresh Rates**: Adjust update frequencies based on business needs to balance real-time insights with performance efficiency. - **Utilize Calculated Fields**: Leverage custom formulas and calculated fields to create business-specific KPIs that are not readily available in source data. - **Ensure Consistent Data Formatting**: Standardize date formats, currency, and numeric values across reports for a unified and accurate analysis. - **Use Filter Controls & Segments**: Enable users to drill down into specific data segments by incorporating interactive filters and dynamic parameters. - **Monitor Report Performance**: Optimize report load times by reducing excessive data blending, limiting the number of widgets per page, and using extract data sources when necessary. ## Pricing Looker Studio is available in two versions: - **Looker Studio (Free)**: Provides access to all core reporting features, unlimited dashboards, and data connectors for Google services (e.g., BigQuery, Sheets, Ads). - **Looker Studio Pro ($9 per user per month)**: Includes advanced features such as enterprise-level security, team collaboration tools, scheduled report delivery, and premium support. Pricing is set at **$9 per user per month**, with potential variations depending on specific business needs and enterprise agreements. ## Usage Across the systems we operate, Looker Studio is used in around half of all situations. Its the go-to analytics tool to get startedd from scratch, but it has its limitations once the data model becomes more advanced, which requires more collaboration, workspaces and team-specific reports. Once the ceiling of Looker Studio is reached, we tend to migrate to [[Preset]]. Explore the interactive demonstration of Looker Studio in the [[Internal Analytics]] demo environment. %% Owner: Philip Boontje %%