Google Looker Studio Overview

Google Looker Studio is a data visualization tool from Google that enables you to create data stories through interactive dashboards. It is a completely online (that is, web-based) tool that facilitates seamless collaboration. It has a simple drag-and-drop interface that enables both non-technical and technical users to easily build visuals and reports. At the time of writing, Looker Studio is provided by Google for free.

It was first introduced in 2016 as Looker Studio 360, which is a premium reporting platform for large enterprises and part of Google Analytics Suite 360. The free version of Looker Studio, targeted at individuals and smaller teams, was announced almost immediately. The product had been in beta status for a couple of years and in 2018, it became generally available. Google Looker Studio is tightly integrated with Google Marketing Platform, which is the expanded and rebranded version of Google Analytics 360 Suite, and Google Cloud...

Technical requirements

To follow the implementation steps for the various operations described in this chapter, you will need to have a Google account so that you can create reports with Looker Studio. It is recommended that you use Chrome, Safari, or Firefox as your browser. Finally, make sure Looker Studio is supported in your country (https://support.google.com/looker-studio/answer/7657679?hl=en#zippy=%2Clist-of-unsupported-countries).

Getting started with Google Looker Studio

Google Looker Studio can be used by both individuals and organizations for their data exploration, visualization, and reporting needs. Whether you are a part of an organization or acting as an individual, you need a Google account to access and work with Looker Studio.

Organizations can leverage Google Cloud Identity directly to provision and manage Google accounts for its members. They can also synchronize users from other identity providers to Google Cloud Identity so that organizational users can access Google products and services. If the organization also uses Workspace (formerly called G Suite), a collection of collaboration and productivity tools, the administrators need to enable Looker Studio for the organization’s users.

As an individual, you can use your Google account (either a Gmail address or any non-Gmail address mapped to your Google account).

To get started, log into your Google account and navigate to datastudio...

Working with data sources

A data source is a foundational element in Looker Studio that lets you explore data and build reports. It is the logical representation of the physical data that resides in external systems such as files, databases, data warehouses, applications, and so on. It defines the schema of the fields sourced from the underlying dataset. It allows you to rename as well as update the data types and formats of the fields. You can also add calculated fields and metrics to enrich the dataset. All this results in a logical data model that facilitates analysis and reporting. Data sources in Looker Studio enable you to create a consistent definition of metrics and representation of data across reports.

Creating a data source

A data source in Looker Studio can be created in two ways: from within a report or directly from the home page. When the data source is created while creating or editing a report, it is scoped for just that report and is referred to as an embedded...

Working with reports

A report in Looker Studio is an asset or entity that enables you to build data stories in the form of dashboards and reports. Conceptually, a dashboard is a centralized tool that provides an at-a-glance view of key performance metrics. It is usually limited to a single page or screen and displays information at a summary level. On the other hand, a data report is an organized representation of data in visuals and text with enough detail. A report usually spans multiple pages to provide a comprehensive analysis of the concerned topic. A more detailed list of the differences between the two forms of data presentation was provided in Chapter 1, Introduction to Data Storytelling.

Creating a report

You can create a new report either from the home page or from within another report. The first step when creating a report is to add a data source to it. While creating the report, you can either create an embedded data source specific to that report or select an existing...

Working with Explorer

Looker Studio Explorer is an exploration tool that enables you to quickly examine the data and obtain insights faster. It provides you with a temporary scratch area where you can easily explore the data and perform ad hoc analysis. Within an Explorer, you create explorations in one or more tabs. Any work you do in an explorer is not saved automatically, unlike reports and data sources. However, you can save your exploration if you wish for later use. Even though Explorer has been available to users for a while, it is still an experimental feature at the time of writing. What this means is that the functionality may change at any time and swiftly, potentially in a disruptive manner.

You can either explore a data source or a chart in a report. Having a separate place to explore the data means that you do not have to create and manage a report if all you need to do is look at the data and understand it. Likewise, you can explore any chart in a report and perform...

Leveraging Looker Studio Gallery

Looker Studio provides a gallery of reports showcasing various report templates and custom visualizations. These are created and published by the community using the developer tools that Google has provided for Looker Studio. You can access Report Gallery at https://lookerstudio.google.com/gallery.

Report Gallery is also a place where Looker Studio users can share their work with the larger community:

Figure 4.51 – Report Gallery with templates, reports, and community visualizations

Any report templates submitted by the community can also be found in Report Gallery. All submissions will be vetted by Google and made available in the gallery upon approval.

Getting help with Looker Studio

Looker Studio has a vibrant and active help community (https://support.google.com/looker-studio/community?hl=en) that enables users to find help, have discussions, provide and receive tips, and more. Google employees and Looker Studio experts around the world provide answers and engage enthusiastically. You will also find product announcements in this forum.

The official product documentation (https://support.google.com/datastudio/?hl=en) is a great resource to get help on how to work with Looker Studio.

Building your first Looker Studio report – creating the data source

As you learn about Looker Studio and explore its various capabilities, you will build a simple report in Looker Studio in an incremental manner. You will do this in this chapter to Chapter 6, Looker Studio Built-in Charts. You will work with the call center dataset of a fictional company that provides meal subscription services to customers in the United States.

The objective of this report is to visualize customer call trends and patterns concerning key factors such as call topics, customer attributes, and so on and also to monitor performance metrics such as Call Abandonment Rate and Average Speed of Answer. The dataset contains 6 months of customer call details from January to June 2022.

As the first step, you must create a reusable data source. The dataset is a CSV file that can be accessed at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Data-Storytelling-with-Google-Data-Studio/blob/master/Call%20Center%20Data...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to access Looker Studio and understood its basic components. Looker Studio comprises four major entities – data sources, connectors, reports, and explorers. You use a connector to connect to the underlying dataset, be it Google Sheets, CSV files, Google Analytics, or anything else from the 500+ supported data platforms and systems. The connector creates a data source in Looker Studio, which is the logical representation of the underlying schema of the dataset. You can enrich the data source by modifying the data types, creating derived fields, and so on.

Reports are built using data from one or more data sources. You can explore data in a temporary environment called Explorer, which gets discarded at the end of your session by default. Explorers are private to you. You can choose to add your explorations to a report for sharing purposes. We reviewed how to create and work with data sources, reports, and explorers. We briefly touched...