An Overview of Looker Studio’s Reporting Capabilities | Brafton

Data is to today’s world what neon colors were to 80s fashion. It’s everywhere, and sometimes a bit overwhelming to make sense of it all. Google Looker Studio won’t help you understand our clothing sins (all hope’s lost there), but with its interactive dashboards and reports, it can aid in understanding the data flood from multiple sources.

Looker Studio is designed to help you visualize and share your data easily, making it a great choice for anyone looking to improve their data analysis and reporting. Whether your team is collaborating on a Google Sheet to track KPIs or you’re sharing your web analytics with a business partner, clear and effective data reporting is key to aligning on strategic objectives. With a Looker Studio report, you have the means to transform raw data into meaningful insights.

Let’s have a look at how you can tell a story with your data to let stakeholders comprehend key points more easily.

What Can a Looker Studio Dashboard Help You Understand?

A Looker Studio dashboard acts as a visualization tool for user behavior across your website and other channels. You can see how users interact with your website based on Google Analytics data and cross-reference that behavior with YouTube Analytics or another tool leveraging the Looker Studio API. Rather than jumping back and forth between the platform’s own marketing dashboards to figure out how different metrics add up to actual business value, you can feed everything into one central hub.

Performance tracking of your marketing campaigns is not just easy with Looker Studio; it’s every data addict’s dream come true. For a simple setup, you can visualize data from Google Analytics and your YouTube channel to assess how your campaigns perform across channels.

Now, if you’ve never created any type of report or you’re not the visual type, drafting one from scratch can feel intimidating. That’s why Looker Studio comes with a whole gallery of templates, some designed by the Looker Studio team, some from the user community. Most Looker Studio reports focus on Google Ads, Google Analytics and/or YouTube. If you’re trying to track your marketing budget and ROI beyond those, you should look into custom reports by other users or create your own.

Basically, choosing which dashboard to create is your biggest challenge. You could track your engagement across local markets, site speed and performance or customer reviews on Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business).

Not every team member thinks in ones and zeros, and the actionable insights from a custom dashboard can often help to quickly identify trends and issues, allowing your brand to correct course in time. Since the dashboards are interactive, it’s also easier to explore data and dig into different elements for more detailed information. Take that, PowerPoint.

Data Visualization Across Integrations

Looker Studio lets you connect to a seemingly endless range of data sources. You can pull data from Google Analytics, YouTube, Semrush and Google BigQuery, among others. This gives you the flexibility to gather all your data in one place.

Keep in mind that some of those connectors are offered by third-party developers, so you may have to do some research to compare different options for one platform or try out which ones give you the best results.

The big advantage, though, is that you can not only pull several data sources into one platform but one canvas. Let’s say you’re trying to understand which PPC campaigns hit your benchmarks. In that case, you could put cost, impressions and clicks for different campaigns and platforms side by side.

If you decide to use Looker Studio as a centralized data management hub, that also gives all stakeholders the opportunity to work with the same live data, improving consistency and accuracy in reporting. Remember all those dull data entry and unifying tasks you were looking forward to? Right, neither do we, and we’re glad that Looker Studio takes care of them.

For scenarios where your data may be useful for business partners, you can even create customized branded dashboards for streamlined live reporting. Thanks to the drag-and-drop interface, it’ll be easy enough for most stakeholders to read through your latest reports in no time.

Options To Upgrade for Marketers

Once enterprises outgrow the already impressive features we discussed, it’s time to think of an actual B2B marketing tech stack, and in our case, that means an upgrade to Looker Studio Pro. The biggest difference here doesn’t lie in supported platforms or designs, as is often the case in software tools. What you’re getting is a robust infrastructure tailored to larger teams.

For instance, under the basic plan, all reports would be linked to the personal account of the employee who set them up. Should they leave your organization, all your reporting would be gone.

With a Looker Studio Pro account, you can transfer critical business assets from one user to the next and create team work spaces for collaboration with specific permissions depending on their job roles. You can also automatically send out reports via Google Chat to colleagues or clients or set alerts to get notified on certain data thresholds.

No worries about colleagues messing with your data, by the way. Thanks to personal report links, you can send copies of your report. So, if your data team has created in-depth dashboards about your quarterly results, the marketing team could edit their version of the same dashboard without affecting the original files.

And finally, every Looker Studio Pro customer gets access to Google Cloud Customer Care, helping less technically savvy employees while saving your technical staff valuable time. 

In short, Looker Studio Pro can be a great investment for large-scale enterprises looking to streamline their reporting across data channels without worrying about consumer-level permission rights.

How Brafton Uses Looker Studio

Just so you know we know what we’re talking about, we’ll give you a sense of how we at Brafton use Looker Studio as a tool in our reporting kit.

Some clients benefit from weekly or monthly ROI reports, whereas others request dedicated one-off reports to achieve a certain goal.

One fairly simple report we created for a client shows the development of users, sessions, page views and engagement rates week over week in percentages. It then breaks down their most important forms’ conversion rates, so they can easily keep track of their leads.

Another client had the same request, but wanted to consider more details. In their dashboard, they now have the option to select the given date range to compare manually. This then updates charts for goal completion trends and conversion rates across their lead magnets. They also get a top-level overview of their site’s position in organic search engine results, plus a few basic statistics about blog engagement.

Every business uses its marketing channels slightly differently, which calls for individualized reporting. That’s why we would recommend playing around with Looker Studio and getting to know its features. As we keep using it, we still adjust reports and design choices every day, and you’ll probably do the same. That’s the beauty of a drag-and-drop UI with access to all your data. 

If you’ve been struggling with your reporting and you didn’t know how to consolidate your stats without a dedicated workforce of data scientists, then sorry, you’re out of excuses now. We never thought we’d say this, but go have some fun with your data!