Updated March 3, 2025
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Building a Dashboard
Keeping track of your business’s online health is getting increasingly difficult because of the sheer amount of information available. Even if you only look at data from Google Analytics and Search Console, it’s still difficult to quickly and easily check how you’re doing before getting lost down a rabbit hole of marketing metrics. This is where Google Looker Studio comes in.
Update: Google Data Studio rebranded to Google Looker Studio on October 11, 2022. Google made this change in an effort to make its business intelligence tools more accessible and user-friendly for businesses by combining them under the Looker brand.
Google Looker Studio (formerly named Google Data Studio) is a new (ish) product from Google that allows you to create dashboards using data from any Google accounts you manage. So you can look at your Search Console data, Analytics information, and AdWords clicks all in one place.
Plugins
But Google Looker Studio doesn’t just allow you to work with data from Google tools. You can pull more than Google Analytics and Search Console into your dashboards. Currently, there are 143+ plugins (or Connectors in Google’s parlance) from non-Google-related tools and 17 from Google’s products. The community connectors range from Salesforce to Pinterest.
Mixing a New Record in the Google Looker Studio
There are several paid platforms, like Dash This, out there that already provide this service, and while the Google service is still not at the same level of polish and flexibility on offer in Dash This, it is certainly improving. We have used Google Looker Studio already to do a number of different things, but here are some ideas that we think it is perfect:
Quick Look Multiple Site/ Account Reports – If you want a high-level quick view of what’s happening in multiple AdWords accounts, Google Looker Studiois perfect. You can pull in data from any account you have in your MCC. So creating a weekly or monthly report that gives you a snapshot of how all your accounts are doing is a great time saver.
SEO Roundups – One bugbear of ours is that if you want to do a quick check of how your SEO efforts are doing, you need to check both Search Console AND Google Analytics. While this isn’t a massive effort, being able to pull data from both platforms onto one dashboard is a big time saver. Especially if you’re managing more than one website. We like to check the following every month for the sites we look after:
- Impressions
- Average Position
- Site CTR
- Clicks
- Sessions
- Landing page sessions
- Search queries
Looking at this information on one screen makes it much easier to analyze than flipping between two.
Dashboard Heaven
Hopefully, Google will continue to add features to Google Looker Studio. Currently, it misses some functionality and aesthetics from paid platforms like Dash This but certainly shows promise. Have you started using Google Looker Studio yet? Do you have any useful dashboards you’d like to share?
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This is a great quick analysis of what’s been evolving in the Google Data Studio front!
And thanks for the shout-out as well! I’d just add that, while Data Studio is sometimes considered an alternative to DashThis, what we do isn’t exactly the same. Our goal is to streamline the process of adding data from several different sources (not only Google) without the use of a third-party system – no coding required, which is always nice!
It’s also very important to us that our clients be supported at all times by us personally – we never remember the importance of having a real human on the line until we’re forced to sift through pages of forums or help center articles to find the answers to our questions!
In case you’re curious, we actually did something similar to you in comparing our system to Data Studio here: https://dashthis.com/google-data-studio-alternative/
Thanks again for the insight!
Thanks for the comment Nathalie!
We’re paid users of DashThis, and use it for our client reporting, so we certainly see the value in your platform! One feature that’s especially good is the recording of historical data (e.g. longer than the 3 months that Search Console currently holds).