Data is to today’s world what neon colors were to 80s fashion. It’s everywhere, and sometimes it’s a bit overwhelming to make sense of it all.
Sure, Google Looker Studio — the data visualization tool formerly known as Google Data Studio — won’t help you understand the weird and wacky world of fashion (all hope’s lost there). But its interactive dashboards and reports can help you understand how to leverage the data flood from multiple sources.
Looker Studio is designed to help you visualize, analyze and share reports of your data sets easily. It’s a great choice for anyone looking to improve their business intelligence, 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 your strategic objectives.
With a Looker Studio report, you have the means to transform raw data into meaningful insights that are easy to display and digest.
Let’s have a look at how you can use your Looker Studio data to tell a compelling “story” that stakeholders can comprehend more easily.
What Can a Looker Studio Dashboard Help You Understand?
A Looker Studio dashboard acts as a data visualization tool for user behaviour across your website and other channels. You can see how users interact with your site based on Google Analytics data and cross-reference that behaviour with YouTube Analytics, Search Console or another system leveraging the Looker Studio API.
Rather than jumping back and forth between different platforms’ marketing dashboards to figure out how different metrics and dimensions add up to actual business value, you can connect data sources and feed everything into one central hub.
With Looker Studio, tracking how your marketing campaigns perform is super easy. For a simple setup, you can add data from Google Analytics, Google Ads or your YouTube channel to assess how your campaigns perform through interactive reports and time-series charts.
Looker Studio offers a whole gallery of templates: some designed by the Looker Studio team, others contributed by an active community of Looker Studio users. Most reports focus on Google Ads, Google Analytics and/or YouTube, but 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.
You could track your engagement across local markets, site speed and performance or customer reviews on Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). With the ability to configure different filters and fields, you can slice, dice and visualize data from every angle — until “the story” practically tells itself.
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, thus allowing your brand to correct course in time. Since the dashboards are interactive, it’s also easier to explore and display data for deeper conversations.
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, Search Console, Google Maps and Google BigQuery, among others. This gives you the flexibility to gather all your data in one place, no matter how many data connectors or multiple sources you rely on.
Keep in mind that some of those connectors are offered by third-party developers, so you may have to do some research, compare options and experiment to see which ones give you the best results.
Another big advantage? You can pull several data sources into one platform and onto one canvas. Let’s say you’re trying to understand which PPC campaigns hit your benchmarks. In that case, you could display data such as 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 over any of the other Supermetrics competitors, that also allows all stakeholders to work with the same live data — improving reporting consistency and accuracy across the board.
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.
In scenarios where your data may be useful for business partners, you can even share reports through customized branded dashboards for streamlined live reporting. Thanks to the drag-and-drop interface, Looker Studio makes it simple for most stakeholders to read through your latest reports in no time.
Key Features and Capabilities of Looker Studio
Before you dive in, it helps to understand the standout aspects that make Looker Studio a worthy business intelligence solution. Here are the leading key features and capabilities:
- Seamless connection between data sources: Looker Studio supports more than 1,000 native and partner connectors, so you can connect data from Google Sheets, Search Console, BigQuery, CRMs and social platforms without writing code.
- Interactive dashboards and reports: With out-of-the-box interactive dashboards, clickable charts and interactive reports, stakeholders can filter, drill down and explore the numbers that matter most in a flash.
- Flexible templates: Jump-start your reporting by choosing from a library of ready-made templates covering Google Ads performance, eCommerce funnels, SEO keyword rankings and more.
- Powerful visual elements: Beyond the standard bar and line charts, Looker Studio includes geo-mapping via Google Maps visuals, scorecards, heat maps and more components. These options make it easier to display data so executive teams grasp insights at a glance.
- Instant collaboration and sharing: Because the platform is cloud-based, teams can share reports instantly, set viewer or editor rights and embed dashboards on intranets or client portals. Commenting, version history and scheduled email delivery also help users align without delays or over-complicated hand-offs.
- Scalability with Studio Pro: When you’re ready to graduate and enter the big leagues, Looker Studio Pro offers enterprise-grade features like team workspaces, enhanced security and priority support from Google Cloud Customer Care.
- Ease of use: From the moment you start using Looker Studio, you’ll notice how user-friendly it is. The drag-and-drop canvas feels familiar, allowing marketers to create engaging dashboards in minutes.
By taking advantage of these key features, you’ll be analyzing data with confidence, telling richer stories and making smarter decisions — faster.
Upgrade Options for Marketers
Once enterprises outgrow the already impressive features we discussed, it’s time to think of an actual B2B marketing tech stack. 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 of all the Looker pricing models, 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 — which isn’t ideal when critical data sets are at stake.
With a Looker Studio Pro account, you can transfer critical business assets from one user to another and create team workspaces for collaboration with specific permissions (depending on their job roles). You can also automatically send out interactive reports via Google Chat to colleagues or clients, or set alerts to get notified on certain data thresholds.
Finally, every Looker Studio Pro customer gets access to Google Cloud Customer Care, always at the ready to help 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 multiple data channels without worrying about consumer-level permission rights.
How Brafton Uses Looker Studio
Just so you know, we walk the talk when it comes to this platform because Brafton uses Looker Studio as a cornerstone of our business intelligence and performance reporting kit.
Some clients benefit from weekly or monthly ROI reports, whereas others request dedicated one-off dashboards 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 while seeing how metrics and dimensions change in real time.
Another client had the same request, but wanted more details. In their dashboard, they now have the option to select the given date range and then 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. Even as we keep using it, we still adjust reports and design choices every day. You’ll probably do the same, and that’s the beauty of a drag-and-drop user interface with game-changing access to all your data.
You don’t have to struggle with reporting or stats consolidation. Neither do you need a dedicated workforce of data scientists, who you probably can’t afford anyway. Now, there’s a way to do data right and some fun along the way!
Editor’s Note: Updated March 2026
