Google Looker Studio: Simple Dashboards should be Free & Easy

Creating dashboards is no longer the sole domain of professional business analysts. If you need to share interactive data insights with your team or your boss and you want to do it in a cost and time efficient way, consider Google Looker Studio.

Looker Studio is the rebrand of Google Data Studio in Oct 2022, after Google acquired Looker. While Looker is an enterprise-focused, paid business intelligence platform used for data modelling, governance and complex data transformations, Looker Studio is simple, low-cost way to connect to data sources and create dashboards.

This article will cover the following points -

1. Why use Looker Studio?
2. Getting Started
3. Exploring Data
4. Build and Share a Simple Dashboard

Why use Looker Studio?

• Low learning curve — you can create reports and dashboard with a few clicks, especially if you are familiar with Google products. There are also multiple convenient templates to leverage off.
• Connects to many data sources, including Google Analytics, Big Query, Redshift, Snowflake, PostgreSQL,Google Sheets, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads, Salesforce, Hubspot.
• Free
• Cloud-based, so you don’t need to install anything.
• You can collaborate on reports with your team and share them to others or in public.

Let’s look at how Looker Studio compares to other tools that are used for creating dashboards. Tableau Desktop is a powerful business intelligence tool commonly used to create complex dashboards. Excel is a popular spreadsheet tool that can also create dashboards.

Next, I will demonstrate how easy it is to get started with Looker Studio and create a simple dashboard based on data from Google Sheets.

We will build this dashboard

Getting started

Go to https://lookerstudio.google.com/.

Click on the USE IT FOR FREE button. Sign in to your Google account (unless you already have).

You will see the Looker Studio home page. At the top left, click Create -> Report

To connect to your data in Google Sheets, search for sheet and click on Google Sheets.

Select your Google Sheet Spreadsheet and Worksheet, then click ADD.

On the confirmation dialog box, click ADD TO REPORT.

In the Report Editor, there are 3 main sections.

1. Occupying the main area is the Page Layout, where you can see the charts, tables and control components in the report.
2. On the right is the Properties Panel, where you setup and stylize a component.
3. At the far right is the Data Panel, where you can see all the data tables and fields available to the report.

Exploring Data

When you create your first report, Looker Studio already provides you with a table to start exploring the data. By default, it chooses one dimension and the metric Record Count.

Dimensions are categories of the data. They are usually text fields, but data and numerical dimensions can also be used. Examples of dimensions are product category, country, or campaign.

Metrics are aggregations on the data set, resulting in numerical values. For example, Record Count shows how many records there are.

Click on “Clicks” in the Data Panel and drag it over the “Record Count” Metric in the Properties Panel. You will see the table update to show the sum of clicks by campaign.

You can have multiple metrics in a table. Your metric can use common aggregations like Sum, Average, Count Distinct, Min, Max and others. It can also compare the aggregated value vs the total or maximum value. It can even perform a calculation against a running window.

To change the metric aggregation, hover over the icon on the left of the metric. It will change to an edit icon. Click on the edit icon.

Name the metric, choose the aggregation “Sum”, and choose the Comparison Calculation “Percent of max”.

You can easily change the data visualization from a table. At the top of the Setup Panel, click on the arrow next to Chart to expand the available visualizations. Click on the Donut Chart icon. (It might remove the metrics down to one.)

There are many visualizations to choose from, including

• time series
• bar/column and stacked bar/column
• line
• combo
• area
• pie
• geographic
• scatter
• pivot table

Histograms are not available by default, but it can be done using a calculated field. At the bottom of the data panel, click on “Add a field”

Name the field “clickBin” and enter in the formula box

FLOOR( Clicks/10)

Click SAVE.

Then in the menu bar, click “Add a chart”, and click on the Column chart under Bar.

Drag “clickBin” under the dimension area, and “Clicks” under the Metric area. Click on the left of the Clicks Metric and change the aggregation to Count.

You have created a histogram.

Let’s visualize the Clicks over time.

On the menu bar, click “Add a chart”. Under Time Series, click on “Time series chart”.

In the Properties Panel, under Dimension, click the blue “+” icon, then click on “Date”. Under Metric, click the blue “+” icon, then click on “Clicks”

The chart is a bit noisy. Click on the left icon of the Date Dimension to edit, then click Type > Date & Time > ISO Year Week. You will see that the dates have been grouped by week.

Quickly create a simple dashboard

You can quickly create a dashboard to share your data insights with others. For that, you want to give others the ability to configure the data visualization.

In the Properties Panel, click on the Drill down slider to turn it on. Then drag the “Date” field to the last Dimension. You can now drill down the chart using the arrow buttons to by date or by week.

In the Properties Panel, click on the Optional metrics slider to turn it on. Then drag the “Impressions” and “Cost” field under Optional metrics. You can now choose optional metrics on the chart using the Optional metrics icon.

In the menu, click Add a control > Date range control, then drag the control above the time series chart.

In the time series chart, drag “Date” to under Date Range Dimension.

Now, you can choose the date range of the dashboard using the date range control.

In the menu, click Add a control > Drop down list control, then drag the control above the time series chart. Then drag “campaignId” under Control field.

Now, you can select which campaign IDs for the dashboard to display.

Click on the dashboard name at the top left, next to the Looker Studio icon, to edit the dashboard name.

On the menu bar, click Theme and layout to open the theme panel. On the Properties Panel, click on the “Simple” theme.

On the menu bar, click the shape icon to draw a rectangle, then drag a rectangle across the top of the dashboard to form a banner.

On the menu bar, click the text icon, then click on the desired location to type the dashboard title. In the Properties Panel, change the font color and size as desired.

On the menu bar, click Add a chart > Scorecard, then drag the scorecard to the top left of the dashboard. Drag Clicks from the Data Panel to the Properties Panel under Metric.

Create another scorecard for cost. There are many other features for Scorecards like sparklines, comparison to target, previous period, or metric.

In the Properties Panel, click STYLE at the top. Click on “Compact Numbers”, and choose the label color, background color, and border radius.

Arrange the rest of the report to look presentable. Add more metrics to the table at the bottom like Impressions, Costs, Leads and Value.

To share the dashboard, click on the top right on Share > Invite People. You can share the report with Google accounts or Groups. You can configure whether the access is for view or edit. For view access, you can even share the report as a public link, by PDF, or embedding in a website. You can also schedule a regular delivery of the report by email.

Conclusion

You have seen how easy it is explore data from Google Sheets and create a simple dashboard in Looker Studio. More complex dashboards can be created, to a point. Here is an example I created. As you succeed in sharing data insights with more dashboards, you will likely think of other challenges common to data practitioners.

How often will the data be refreshed?

Looker Studio will automatically refresh the data very 15 minutes. This interval can be configured.

How many users can access the dashboard at the same time?

There is no official limit to the number of concurrent users for Looker Studio. However, as concurrent usage of the dashboard increases, you may encounter slower dashboards, due to the performance of the underlying data provider. This can be mitigated by adjusting cache settings or using an extracted data source. You may also encounter limits of the data connector you use, and tweaking or switching the data provider should also be considered.

How secure is my dashboard?

Looker Studio can control the editing and sharing capabilities of collaborators when sharing Looker Studio assets. Looker Studio Pro, the paid version, also enables more granular permissions and roles. However, fine-grained data access control and audit logging will require another solution.

How do I prevent inaccurate data from affecting my dashboard?

Inaccurate, incomplete and stale data will affect the value of the dashboard, but this is beyond the scope of Looker Studio. To address such issues, you need to run data processing jobs to check and enforce data before the data is made available. This can be done in Google Cloud or a data platform of your choice.

How do I combine data from multiple data sources?

Looker Studio supports simple data transformations and joins. If your needs are more complex, you need to run separate data processing jobs to enrich, aggregate, and integrate your data. This can be done in Google Cloud or a data platform of your choice.

What is the exact definition of this metric / dimension?

Data definitions should be stored in a separate data catalog, which ideally is accompanied with data statistics / samples, data quality metrics and lineage. Looker Studio does not support integration with data catalogs.