If you're a marketing organization that wants to own your data architecture, get away from hours of manual excel work, and build a flexible and scalable BI practice for yourself and your clients, Adverity is your solution. Especially if you don't have a dedicated analytics team or current database solution. If you have access to a wide variety of API's and a fully staffed team to custom develop new connectors in under 30 days for no incremental cost, you're probably best in-housing
Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.
I think it would have been more user friendly if there was more labelling capabilities, so that when you are sharing the dashboard they would explain what the data is - rather than depending on someone knowing how to use the dashboards or being there to explain it.
Our teams found that some of the scheduling functionality could be a little big buggy, so this was something that needed extra care and attention, so therefore may be an area that needs to be improved (unless it was just our account and usage).
It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration
It is not ideal and requires time and dedication to understand how to work with it. Also, it has a lot of limitations around data it can accept. But in most cases, this tool is sufficient for everyday tasks of product and marketing departments. I wouldn't say that the interface is very user-friendly, but for people who regularly work with analytical tools, it must be ok.
I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.
Previously I had never really used a tool like this, only using software such as GA to look at any insights and review performance. So I think that the combined view of having all of the data sets (Which in my role I wouldn't always particularly have access to), was really useful. As an individual who was optimising our clients websites it meant that I was really able to prioritise what was important, but also have a great view of absolutely all activity that was happening
Looker Studio is far easier to implement, stand up, and learn. The interface is simpler and user-friendly for various levels of data visualization/analysis knowledge and experience. The biggest benefit of Looker Studio, however, is its ease of connection to GA data and speed. Furthermore, since it is an online program/tool, it requires less CPU/battery/storage on the user's device.
This tool has allowed us to be able to see areas for opportunities, when all of the data has been combined
We were also able to better prioritise actions and where to focus our attention, when we had one view where all of the data was together. This allowed us to deliver better results for our clients, and also have a clearer roadmap of activity
