TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Looker Studio

Score7.8 out of 10

296 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Looker Studio?

Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Looker Studio has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 296 ratings of Looker Studio's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Drill-down analysis

    Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.

    Category average: 8.7

  • Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)

    Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.

    Category average: 8.8

  • Publish to PDF

    Category average: 8.9

Areas for Improvement

  • Predictive Analytics

    Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.

    Category average: 7.5

  • Pattern Recognition and Data Mining

    Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.

    Category average: 6.2

  • Integration with R or other statistical packages

    Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.

    Category average: 6.5

Reviews

What users are saying about Looker Studio.
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Very convenient tool for structured data visualisation

Incentivized
Maria SergeevaView profile
UX and Content Designer in Marketing at Career Pathway Institute (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looker Studio helps us to organize and visualize our data. We have some user profiles with their demographics, specific situation descriptions, behavior, etc. Looker works well to gather and make charts from this data. It is very useful for presentations, meetings or any research. The charts created in Looker can be downloaded in PDF, it is very convenient to use them.

Pros

  • Data visualisation
  • Data extraction
  • Data sharing

Cons

  • Requires learning curve
  • Data must be structured to download
  • Loading time is long

Return on Investment

  • Speed up report creation
  • Helps during the meetings
  • Speed up the business desicions

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop

Other Software Used

Slack, SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Figma, Canva

Easy to set up and deploy company wide

Incentivized
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Is the main dashboard of the company. We use it mainly for live data that we want to view live. We also use it to explore data to try to figure out issues, opportunities etc..

Pros

  • Connections with the google ecosystem
  • Speed of reports
  • Data ownership

Cons

  • There has been a lack of new features inside the ecosystem from some time now
  • There is no easy way to create relationships between data tables

Return on Investment

  • It eneables the CEO to have a 360 view of the business with all the integrations it proveds
  • A lot of option to import data
  • User friendly for the final user

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI and Tableau Desktop

Other Software Used

Microsoft Power BI, Tableau Desktop, Microsoft Excel

Easy Access to Web Data with Low Barrier-to-Entry.

Incentivized
Shelby KolbView profile
Data Analyst at PlayStation (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Looker Studio daily to build dashboards and reports for routine analysis, as well as data pulls for our site data. The internal team uses these dashboards to analyze data needed for report-building and address business questions. My team and I also utilize Looker Studio to create self-serving dashboards for our key functional teams and stakeholders who have specific questions or routine needs.

Pros

  • Connects to GA4.
  • Loads quicker than other tools such as Tableau.
  • It is easy to share dashboards for viewing and co-editing purposes.
  • It is easy to export data from tables.
  • Ability to create filters and custom/calculated metrics.

Cons

  • There are several limitations to data manipulation - especially with different scopes.
  • Limited functionality on pivoting data, etc - ie, cannot create segments.
  • Data has to be refreshed if new dataLayer elements are added often manually.
  • A limited number of charts, graphics, etc.
  • Limited design abilities (cannot bring in custom fonts, etc).

Return on Investment

  • Ability to create/stand up business objective-driven dashboards.
  • It has significantly aided in the QA of site features with analysis of Google Tags (e.g., ensuring that checkout flow does not have significant issues when Shopify launched extensibility).
  • They expanded the interest in and desire for functional teams to be more data-driven in their stratification/optimization tactics.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop

Other Software Used

Shopify Plus, Tableau Desktop, Microsoft Excel

Lots of stuff... for free!

Incentivized
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our company we use Looker Studio to analyze and understand internal KPIs, mostly to verify the profitability of contracts (man hours invested vs value of the contract) by importing time logs from Jira and financial data from our ERP. With the same data we are also able to allocate resources on various projects to normalize the workloads and optimize costs.

Pros

  • Data integration with various sources
  • Dashboards are easy to make
  • Google Workspace integration

Cons

  • Complex data modeling is best done at the source
  • The best performance is obtained with BigQuery. Avoid large datasets from other sources
  • Some features are locked in the "Pro" version, but you can work around some of them

Return on Investment

  • It's easy to use, so your IT needs only to provide the data, while dashboards can be created by the relevant people
  • Has BigQuery behind, so little effort required for ETL transformations
  • The output, if done correctly, are great

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI

Other Software Used

Jira Service Management, Jira Work Management, Salesforce CMS, Google Workspace, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Forms, Postman, Airtable, Google Calendar, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet

Optimise content with Data Studio

Incentivized
Alice MarshallView profile
eCommerce Editor in Marketing at Future Plc (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Data Studio to monitor the performance of eCommerce articles, looking at revenue, click through rate, ePM, and traffic. Using this data allows us to see how well optimised a page is to convert and make money from our affiliate partners. It also allows us to create different views and bring together different types of articles in different verticals and sectors of retail and eCommerce.

Pros

  • Customisation
  • Presentation of data
  • Different measurements of data

Cons

  • Load time
  • Bugs/reports breaking

Return on Investment

  • Allowed us to better optimise pages that weren’t working previously and converting
  • Able to monitor tags and events live and therefore be reactive to the data

Other Software Used

Parse.ly, Airtable, Dayforce