Looker Studio: The Affordable & Easy Way for Small Businesses to Understand their Digital Marketing Analytics

Oftentimes when I have a consultation with a prospective client, one of their pain points is that they have no clue how their marketing investments are performing. They’re putting money into multiple channels, and they have no intel on what has a positive or negative ROI. They’re also scared they’re missing a key insight that could help their business pop off.

The client’s lack of knowledge usually boils down to:

• They have tracking set-up, but can’t make sense of the data
• They’re engaged with a digital marketing agency that is giving them numbers that don’t match with their incoming business and revenue
• They have no tracking set-up, at all

Business owners and marketers need a separate form of data reporting that can’t be bastardized by a biased third party. It needs to be powerful, but it can’t be expensive.

This is where Looker Studio comes in. Looker Studio is a free reporting dashboard that can be tied to internal reporting tools, giving small businesses an easy way to track, manage, and read their digital marketing data, in perpetuity. In this article, I explain what Looker Studio is, what it can provide to business owners, and how to go about getting a data dashboard that will give you powerful, actionable marketing insights.

Jump to:

Looker Studio is a free reporting dashboard tool from Google. It allows you to connect your Google measurement tools – like GA4, Google Ads, and Google Search Console – as well as other external measurement tools. You can use the data from these platforms to build a centralized dashboard that can visualize different marketing metrics.

It’s based on the data you own, and can be customized to display whatever data you want, even blended data, provided your data tracking tools are tracking it.

Yes. I believe Looker Studio has a low barrier to entry and learning for even the most tech-unsavvy among us. This makes it the main draw for why a small business marketer would want to use Looker Studio as their data reporting dashboard. 

That said, I wouldn’t say it’s easy for a novice to build, customize, and immediately know how to interpret the data. But paying someone a one-time fee to build the dashboard and show you how to use it and interpret the reports is a cost-effective solution to finally understanding your marketing data.

• It’s free (you can upgrade to a paid version, Looker Studio Pro,  that allows more connections, more collaboration, and more robust data visualization)
• You have the ability to fully own it and access it at any time
• It provides a central location to visualize disparate data sources
• It can be customized to blend disparate data sources, giving even more powerful insights
• It can be built to be dynamic, with a toggle that changes dates and data inputs
• It’s so, so much easier to use and interpret than GA4 – even as someone seasoned in Google Analytics, I find the native reporting dashboard in GA4 to be cumbersome.
• It gives you direct access to your data and tracking tools without relying on a third-party to report the data to you
• Google provides a bunch of ready-made dashboards that you can just hook your data sources into

• The main disadvantage we encounter is that Looker Studio can be glitchy. Not with the data, but with manipulation of the charts. A few retries get us to where we need to be.
• If you’re using a large dataset, the charts take some time to update and display data, sometimes up to several minutes
• Some external data sources can only be connected if you pay extra to access their APIs
• If you’re looking for robust customization and data blending, Looker Studio’s capabilities are limited (we don’t ever find this to be a problem with our small business clients)
• For even small businesses, you do need to create conversion tags to get great marketing insights, and there is no out-of-the-box solution – you need to add tracking tags manually
• The data is not real-time – it can take a couple of days for the data in Looker Studio to catch-up to the data tracked in your reporting tools
• If you’re not familiar with data analysis, you may still need someone to show you how to interpret the data

This all said, I believe Looker Studio is a great, easy-to-understand and affordable solution for small businesses to wrap their head around – and make decisions based on – their data analytics.

There are so many charts and visuals you can leverage to help you understand your data in Looker Studio. It really depends on your business and industry to define which metrics are best to track. That said, here are some of my favorite metrics to visualize:

Month-over-Month Traffic Channels

Month-over-Month Conversion Channels

Top Landing Pages

Quick comparison numbers in the form of Scorecards

AI Search Traffic Metrics

Social Media search traffic metrics (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc.)

Image courtesy of DataBloo

Geographics for Traffic

If you have a Google account, you can go to Looker Studio and choose one of their premade templates and start hooking in your data to the dashboard (this all assumes you have some sort of data tracking in place).

You can also hire a company like Digital Dynamo to build a custom dashboard for you. We’ll implement tracking tags for you and show you how to glean insights from the data that’s visualized.

Just because you run or work for a small business doesn’t mean you should be left in the dark with your marketing data. If you feel lost with your marketing efforts, but don’t have the money nor the experience to leverage big name tracking and reporting tools, Looker Studio gives you an affordable and easy-to-understand option to make sense of your marketing data. If you are a luddite or complete novice when it comes to data analytics, we recommend hiring someone (like Digital Dynamo) to build the Looker Studio dashboard for you and teach you how to use it. We can build a dashboard for a little as $500.00.

If you need help with leveraging Google Analytics for your business or would like to learn more about getting a Looker Studio dashboard created for you, set-up a free consultation.