Looker Studio (still Data Studio to most of us): the six dashboards worth building, and the three that waste a week

Google renamed Data Studio to Looker Studio in October 2022 and most marketers still call it Data Studio, which tells you something about how little the rename mattered. What matters is that it is free, it connects natively to GA4, Google Ads, Search Console and Sheets, and it is the fastest way I know to put a number in front of a CEO without a BI budget.

I have built it at a PEO, a mortgage lender, a law firm and a franchise system. The same half-dozen reports earn their keep every time. The others look good in a demo and die in a month.

First, the plumbing

Looker Studio is only as good as what feeds it. Before the first chart:

• GA4 with events that mean something. Form submits, calls, chat starts, key page views. If GA4 only has the defaults, the dashboard will tell you about sessions, which nobody can act on.
• A Sheets layer for anything the connectors cannot see. CRM exports, closed revenue, cost per channel, the offline stuff. A scheduled export into a Sheet is a perfectly good warehouse for a company with one marketer.
• A blended source for cost and outcome. Looker Studio can blend Google Ads cost with GA4 conversions on a date key. Add the Sheet with closed deals and you have cost per opportunity, which is the number leadership actually wants.
• Naming discipline. Campaign names and UTMs that follow one pattern. Every ugly dashboard I have inherited was ugly because the data under it was.

The six that pay

1. The Monday page. One screen, five numbers, one chart. Leads this week versus last, qualified leads, pipeline created, cost per qualified lead, and the trailing-twelve-week trend. This is the page the CEO opens. If you build nothing else, build this.

2. Channel to pipeline. Rows are channels (organic, paid search, paid social, referral, direct, email), columns are sessions, leads, qualified, opportunities, closed, cost. The point is the right-hand columns. Most companies have never seen their channels ranked by what closed. The first time they do, the budget conversation changes.

3. Speed to lead. Pull first-response time out of the CRM into a Sheet, chart it by rep and by hour of day. At Gordon Law this report is what made a two-hour SLA real. Nothing changes behavior like a bar chart with names on it.

4. The content ledger. Landing page, entrances, engaged sessions, conversions, and the Search Console queries driving each. Filter to the last 90 days of published articles. It shows which pieces earn their keep, which need a better call to action, and which topics are being asked about that you have not written yet.

5. Search Console, opportunity view. Queries with impressions in the thousands and a position between 8 and 20. These are the pages one rewrite away from page one. A scorecard of them, refreshed weekly, is a content calendar that writes itself.

6. The partner or location view. For a franchise, a branch network or a referral program: the same five numbers, filtered by location, with a comparison to the network median. Partners do not read reports; they look for their own name and then at whoever is above them.

The three to skip

The everything dashboard. Forty widgets, every source, every metric. It loads slowly, nobody reads past the first row, and it exists so someone can say they have a dashboard. One page per decision beats one dashboard per data source every time.

The real-time page. Real time is a feature for incident response, not marketing. Nobody makes a better decision because they watched sessions tick up at 2:14 p.m.

The vanity scorecard. Followers, impressions, open rate, bounce rate, time on page, as a standing report. These are diagnostics. Keep them a click deep for when a number on the Monday page moves and you need to know why.

Three habits that keep it alive

Put the owner's name and the refresh date on every page. Review the Monday page in an actual Monday meeting, out loud, for four weeks, until it is a habit. And delete a report the first time you notice nobody has opened it in a month; the only thing worse than no dashboard is a dashboard people have learned to ignore.

Looker Studio will not replace a warehouse at a company with a data team. For the rest of us, it is the difference between marketing that reports activity and marketing that reports results, and it costs nothing but the week it takes to wire it properly.